Chapter Text
Carol takes up her sgian dubh with the seriousness it deserves. The day after she receives it from Rudy, in the face of his wincing smile, she spends four consecutive hours researching blade care on the library's brand-new Idell Empusa desktop, then takes a trip to Raindoubt City for a safety-orange whetstone and fiber cloth set. On the seller's advice—a tropical piscine monster, tattooed up to her neck, whose lean over the counter was likely a practiced flirtation; Carol's severity has an inexplicable effect on certain women—she also visits Raindoubt's Historical Arms Museum.
She reviews kriegsmessers; zweihanders; trench knives, set alongside punctured helmets to demonstrate their gruesome power; a lone tachi recovered from the Hearn expedition. Something about the sight of this lattermost blade under glass, cast in cool off-blue by the Museum's poor lighting with rust crawling up from the tang, disturbs her enough to cut her visit to Raindoubt short, after the Museum, without picking up Toriel's key lime liqueur. The Holiday sgian dubh—a tapered hand's-length of steel in a sheath etched with impenetrable Gaelic—jostles unpleasantly against her leg as she returns to her car, not quite snug in her reindeer-fit hoof-boot. For the sake of not losing it under the brake pedal mid-trip, she removes it from her sock and leaves it instead in the booster chair she bought for little December, in the passenger's seat, just barely within arm's reach.
Her next anniversary gift to Rudy is a homemade ankle sheath in candy-cane striping, with custom leather fasteners and straps to compensate for her own amateurish woodwork, fitted to be worn with a custom novelty sock. His is monogrammed RH. Hers she signs just C, like she always has. Predictably, he's delighted beyond reason; she's never met a man more rewarding to shop for. At the Dreemurrs' he insists on wearing a kilt so he can model "the new Holiday fashion" all evening. Carol has to enlist Toriel to talk him out of trying to wear it to bed, just to test whether it's as perfect a fit as he insists, new sgian dubh and all. It wouldn't serve her side of the argument to admit how much she likes the image, despite the obvious risks of damage to the mattress or his own skinny ankles if the fasteners should snap, so she doesn't.
For years afterwards she keeps an eye on the Arms Museum's collections; when they auction off the Hearn exhibit, she makes sure to acquire the tachi, gives it pride-of-place in her kitchen, and dedicates a corner of the woodshed to maintaining it with a pedal grinding wheel and a variety of cloths, testing its edge on soft targets like apples and fruitcakes (which her husband, with his ineffable, savant-like talent for PR, convinces everyone is a fun party trick rather than her own fixation). Everyone calls it the mayor's katana and eventually she gives up on correcting them, content with giving the thing a functional afterlife rather than an eternity under glass.
At her last visit with the extended Holiday family, Hermann (deep in his eggnog cups, red with drink and contempt, ill-fit to a face so much like Rudy's) calls her frigid and sentimental without pausing for breath, as if he might outpace his own hypocrisy by speaking quickly in low tones. The closest thing my brother could find to a man, Clar, I swear. And this thing she does, carrying dad's knife everywhere—it's an insult, some kind of power play. She should've just left it alone—
She appreciates the excuse to remove him from her holiday card list. But he isn't wrong. Carol is practical, frigid, and awkward to hold; that said, she sees no reason she can't be sentimental too, albeit in different terms. What is useful to her, she holds close and maintains well, so that it will remain useful; utility aggregated over time becomes significance, and significance maintained becomes irreplaceability, and, after a fashion, love.
On December's thirteenth birthday, Carol gives her the Holiday sgian dubh. "I was the first woman in our family to carry this," she tells December. "You'll be the second."
And, true to form, December makes extensive use of it—to scratch her initials into her desk; to crop Asriel's left horn, because he's worried they've "grown in lopsided"; to saw through the cables affixing the year's holiday tree to the Dreemurrs' van roof, with the mounting frustration of a girl whose primary reference for rope-cutting is blockbuster films about pirates. She calls it the "skidoo knife," and Carol gives up on correcting her when Rudy joins in—"Oh, you kid," he tells her, grinning at a joke she won't understand.
Over the course of two months, constant use blunts its single edge to near-uselessness, as is to be expected; December's flute's suffered a similar fate, bent dog-legged by some incident she never explained, abandoned as she pivoted to vocals. But the flute was a toy; the knife is not. So Carol relocates her pedal grinding wheel to the garden table, beneath the decorative Frosty umbrella, fills a small satchel with knife care supplies from the same Raindoubt City retailer (the tropical fish woman has learned not to flirt with her by now), lays it all out, and waits for December to ask for instruction.
A week after that, she finds a fleck of metal on December's computer desk: one-quarter the size of her pinky's nail, the same steel she remembers. She grips it in her palm and fails to draw blood.
When December comes home she attempts to carry her bag upstairs, but Carol—studied in her family's habit of avoidance—pulls her into the kitchen first, still scraping bits of January frost off her newly-acquired Hometown Heroes letter jacket. Refusing to sit at the dining table, December uses the bag as a makeshift cushion and leans against the wall, forcing herself languid, sneering beneath her ill-maintained bangs. Some recessive gene gave her hair that resembles neither Rudy's nor Carol's, a dirty, uneven coal-black that tangles easily and absorbs her shed-season velvet like a greasy kitchen sponge.
She refuses to produce the sgian dubh, but when Carol shows the splinter as evidence December hisses out an admission that it's in one of Asriel's anniversary-edition game boxes, big enough to hide such things. She hasn't moved when Carol returns with it. "Catty was messing with it," she says (the Cattenheimers' oldest, presumably; their youngest is around Noelle's age). "She got twitchy. Nicked her finger and dropped it, like it's a—a rattlesnake, or something. And I caught it, but—" She flicks her neck to loosen up, huffs a breath, indicates a slow parabolic arc into the asphalt outside the schoolhouse, arm outstretched. "Couldn't take my weight, is all. Cheezus."
"What I don't understand is how Catty could have…" December averts her eyes. "Ah. You were trying to impress her?"
"…mmh."
It's absurd and teenage enough that Carol feels herself relax, just a little. She doesn't mind the Cattenheimers. Catty is about as anodyne as December's friends get, shy of Asriel; better her than that urchin-thorned girl, or the cat from Waterfall Estates who kept asking for milk. "Well. You should be glad it isn't irreparable. We'll arrange some time for you to learn how to repair it, and if you can't manage yourself, there are a few competent artisans outside of town—"
"I don't want to."
"…that isn't an option." She runs one finger across her temple and feels the ghost of a tension headache approaching. Given their relative positions in the room—Carol standing, her daughter on the floor—she's inevitably going to be the villain of whatever drama December is imagining for herself, a slumped but defiant underdog bearing up nobly. "What are you expecting me to do? Fix it for you?"
"Leave it alone. If I wanna use it chipped, I'll use it chipped."
Distinctly a tension headache. "You'd ruin the blade in short order."
"Fine by me. Just take it back, then, if you don't like how I play."
"Is that actually what you want? Were you doing this on purpose?" December averts her eyes again. "This is your responsibility, December."
"So, what, if I don't want to keep carrying around your stupid skidoo knife—"
"It's yours," Carol corrects. "All I'm asking is that you take care of it."
"Sure. Yeah. It's mine. Except I can't do anything with it without you breathing down my neck like it's some important historic crap and not just Grandpa Donner's barfight shank." At Carol's blink December grins with her peculiar unmalicious joy at locating a weak point, as if she's solving a puzzle rather than inflicting wounds; she comes by it honestly, of course. "Uncle Hermann told me."
Two weeks prior they'd had to reverse course en route to Portsmouth International Airport so that December could properly stow the sgian dubh, which she'd forgotten was in her new black messenger bag with the band pins. Noelle picked up on the tension in the air over it and had a crying fit so strong that she seemed on the verge of vomiting, pallor dying her hide to the color of weak tea. They ended up missing the flight, though they were fortunate enough to find a backup and so Clarice Holiday did not die before they arrived. Carol remained outside the hospital room and allowed the children to say their goodbyes with Hermann standing over them, his white shirt damp with sweat; evidently he took the opportunity of his wife's death to tell December about it. "Uncle Hermann isn't invited to our reunions for a reason."
"But he wasn't lying, was he. Even if he was an asshole, he wasn't lying."
"It kept your father safe."
"From his dad."
"It still kept him safe."
Rudy told her the story relatively early in their relationship, with a smile to indicate that it wasn't particularly serious, making jokes about Scottish drinking habits, though in truth Donner had been a lifetime teetotaler, solemn and controlled, a believer in discipline. She asked to see the knife—evidently she'd been the first of his girlfriends to respond that way—and spent an illustrative minute examining it in the half-light outside the movie theater, imagining how its tapered edge must've hovered just shy of that sad gimlet eye, a bright line between Rudy and the grasping dark. She'd told it, or him, well done, and returned it; he'd proposed two months later.
Of course neither of them has ever told December the specifics. Carol's aware she's a poor storyteller, and so she hoped Rudy would broach the subject, but now Hermann's preempted them both and poisoned the well, as he always does. "You're under no obligation to carry it day-to-day. But it might be useful to you, eventually. All I want is for you to have some way to take care of yourself." She can feel the insufficiency of the explanation as she starts it. "You take care of it, and it takes care of you."
"In Hometown. Yeah, it'll really help me when Bratty tries to jump me with a pizza cutter." December laughs, humorless. "Everyone but Azzy already thinks I'm a psycho, you know. Now I'm supposed to be the psycho girl who spends all day waiting for someone to jump her so she can stick them? You want me to make it worse?"
It doesn't get any more productive after that. There's no way for her to explain the significance that doesn't sound mechanical, or artificial, a ritual without roots—or else some fanciful self-indulgence she is pushing on her daughter, as if it will prove anything. Strict obedience to Holiday tradition would never have put the sgian dubh in Carol's hands at all. Though, of course, strict obedience to Holiday tradition would have killed her husband before he reached eighteen.
Carol never formally revokes December's ownership of the sgian dubh, but it finds its way back to her anyway. Rudy calls its new defect a "notch," and says it has "character." A few weeks' cautious use of the grinding wheel ablates it away. It's lopsided, she thinks.
Soon afterwards, on Noelle's fifth birthday, Carol hands her a plastic butterknife so that she can cut her own birthday cake, and Noelle works herself into an honest-to-god panic attack trying to figure out how she's supposed to set it down without "hurting" it. Almost certainly a result of the whole extended debacle with the chipped blade; she'd toddled into December's room and heard her account, or caught the tail end of their argument as it escalated, and learned exactly the wrong lesson from it.
While December entertains Noelle's party guests (intense acoustic guitar covers of all the cat-themed songs she knows, with exaggerated headbanging that makes her dizzy, until little Catti's parents are laughing too hard to remember Noelle's fit; she'll do anything, really, for her sister) and Noelle sniffles against Rudy's flank, sandwiched between him and Carol like she likes, Carol feels something inside her—too ill-defined to qualify as hope—tighten into a small, dark knot.