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dess takes a hearty pull from the joint between her lips, and lets the smoke slip out as asriel nuzzles his nose closer into the side of her hip. he’s probably half asleep, the cold slipping through the windows open in dess’s room making him run warm, but she’s built for the cold. her name is december, after all. she can’t help it.
he looks up at her with his big brown eyes, somehow oddly similar to kris’ eyes- though his are deeper, and less flecked with amber. they look sleepily up at her, blinking with his stupidly long lashes. he’s like an angel, sent down just for her. just for her to corrupt, for her to kiss and laugh with and adore.
“what, want a hit?” she jokes, knowing he won’t. dess smokes all the time in front of him, but he’s never asked to hit, and she doesn’t offer. she’s more than aware of his stance on things like that, and while he won’t preach to her about it, she accepts it. she can choose to ruin her body and mind all she wants- but why should azzy just because she’s got things she doesn’t want to deal with?
however, he nods, shifting onto his elbows and leaning slightly towards her hoof still holding the joint delicately, as it curls smoke up towards the ceiling and out of the window. it almost wreathes him in a halo, around his horns, around his lidded eyes.
she raises her eyebrows, slightly. “are you sure?” she asks carefully. he nods a second time.
she brings it to his lips, watching him inhale just a bit of it, and rubbing his back and he coughs it out.
“easy, tiger,” she murmurs, claiming it as her own again. “you okay?”
“yeah,” he says hoarsely, his paws coming to rest on her elbows. he’s already clingy sober, when he gets the chance to be, but she imagines that even being a little stoned will exemplify that. she doesn’t mind, but it is funny.
she runs a hoof- the one not occupied by the weed- through his messy white-blond curls. “tell me if you don’t feel good, or want more…or want to stop.”
“ ‘kay,” he says, reaching bravely towards her hoof once more. she presses it to his lips, and pulls it away when she feels he’s had his fill. she doesn’t expect him to know his limits yet, but the last thing she wants is him gravely stoned in her bed and upset. she’s an old pro, thus, can determine when to say when. it’s been her vice since her middle school days.
“ ‘s not as bad as i imagined,” he says quietly.
“no?” she says, a half-chuckle.
“kind of nice. not to be worrying…like a weight lifted off my shoulders.”
i love you, she thinks, but she smokes more instead. she chokes in it, and will forever.
—
her guitar is badly out of tune, and she’s too pissed off to fix it. she could smash it as easily as the others in he room, but instead, she just stares it down like it’s a snake that’s going to bite her. a ghost that will attack as soon as she turns her eyes away. she will win this fight.
“dess?” come a soft voice- she expects it to be elly, peeking with ever-fearful eyes through a crack in the door. instead, it’s kris.
she can’t say anything; it only comes out a somewhat-garbled half sob, somewhere between words and a wail. she doesn’t want anyone to see her like this, especially not kris, who can not only tell their brother about her little breakdown, but also idolizes her enough that seeing their idol in shambles could scare her worse than elly.
kris pads into the room in their mismatched wool socks, no doubt made by toriel. they climb quietly onto dess’s bed, pressing a kiss to their forehead. they say nothing- they very rarely do, and dess it used to it. it’s a move they’d likely learned from azzy, who had learned it from toriel. some form of comfort that doesn’t take words kris doesn’t have, and doesn’t give even when they do.
it makes her cry harder. they have elly, sweet elly, who is so unequivocally devoted to her sister that it makes dess hurt inside that she can’t be better for her. elly who draws pictures and slides them under the door on nights where dess refuses to unlock it, fearing what’s on the other side. elly, who never asks more of dess than she can give even if she deserves more.
and she has asriel, who’d been forced by toriel at five to go next door and play instead of staying inside and too scared to speak to anyone who weren’t his parents. azzy, who’d never thought of dess any worse when her worse sides began to flourish. azzy who always understood. azzy who always cared. azzy who never asked anything in return.
and in addition to those two, who were two of the people who probably loved her most in the world, was kris. kris of few words, sitting on her bed, holding her hands in their own small and calloused ones. kris, who never seems to feel one way or the other about anything. kris, who only confessed their deepest feelings to dess, and dess alone.
dess sucks in a large breath, and tries not to break in front of them. the christmas kids could only stand one fucked-up member, anyhow.
—
“you’re so cool, dessy,” noelle says, her voice sounding almost reverent. she’s in her passenger seat, knees pulled to her chest. she’s looking at dess like she hung the moon and stars personally.
sometimes dess wishes she wouldn’t. it would make this, whatever it is, easier for everyone involved. quick and painless. whatever has been eating at the capillaries and tubes in her heart would make it quick and painless, but it stops and thinks about noelle for as long as dess does.
—
the lake is quiet, desolate. inhabited by only dess and asriel’s mingled breaths. the moon shines, big and yellow over its glassy surface.
something about this night will always belong to only them. the cacophony around them, azzy’s shuffling feet, the way dess huffs out a breath every few seconds or so. it’s hot around them, suffocatingly so.
for example: asriel is the only one who knows about the time dess came to the lake alone, looking at the stars noelle thinks she hung, and dove so far down into its water she thought she wouldn’t come up. only dess knows the horrible things he’d said to his father, when his parents had split. they both are the only ones who know they’re in love, and not for fun, but devastatingly.
because dess tells herself over and over that this can’t last, not if she can help it. she wants to free asriel, grant him wings to fly away and forget about the girl he wasted 12 years on.
—
she can feel the let down before it comes, because the way she senses asriel’s college acceptance is almost supernatural. which is why no one sees her for days, why her bedroom door stays barricaded closed, and why things she’d been carefully tiptoeing around in hopes they’d disappear begin to crop out again. dust bunnies turn into shadows, clawing at her mind, and she can’t get out of bed and smoke weed she doesn’t have to make it all go away.
“dess?” noelle asks, knocking on her door, harder than she had prior. when the clock had hit three days, she’d begun to worry her sister had done it for real this time and had been rotting in her bed. mom would be mad if she had to wash that out of them.
“dess!” she yells through the wood, pounding harder. “dess, please, it’s elly! i miss you.”
the door still doesn’t open, and unless dess can somehow magic it open using only the power of her fear, it won’t any time soon.
—
how does one say they broke up when they weren’t together and no words were exchanged?
asriel hadn’t seen dess in weeks, and given her less than stellar attendance in school, he couldn’t bring himself to be anything but annoyed. he had never been an angry person, and wouldn’t have been cruel had she just gone to him and called it, whatever ‘it’ is, quits. what’s cruel is leaving him in the dark, an empty phone, nothing made explicitly clear.
he knows kris hasn’t seen her, and likely they’d become collateral damage- which is a damn shame, because kris probably loved dess as much as they loved their own brother. it’s one thing to ignore asriel, the one who had been by her side since the very start, the one person in the world who knew december holliday front and back and inside out. the only person who knew things she refused to tell anyone else, the only person who had seen and held her in a way no one ever would. even with her soft white underbelly bared to anyone, no one would ever be asriel. he knew this.
the only person who’d seen scars, smiles, and sadness- and she’s choosing to ignore him like none of that mattered.
he’d ask noelle, but he doesn’t want to risk disrupting the casual peace they’d been skating along all week. and she’s fragile; whatever is going on with dess, it extends far beyond asriel and kris, and angel knows he doesn’t want to risk making her cry. he loves noelle, sweet and tender noelle, too much for that.
so he bites his tongue a little longer, and hopes for sun through all of the snow.
—
dess had been many things.
her classmates would say volatile, violent, mean, quiet. school wasn’t the place for dess, the desks suffocating, the linoleum floors closer to a prison hallway than one to english class. she hated it, and it hated her. her classmates chose to interpret her hate for the chalkboard as a hate for everything, but they’d never seen her at the lake, or with the kids. they’d never know the true december holiday, the dess who was given wings.
her mother would say she’s impulsive, and selfish. her father would say she’s a good big sister, or at least she tries.
noelle holliday would have more to say. noelle holliday would say that dess was her everything. dess let her sleep in her bed when she was scared, which was frequently enough she had her own pillow. dess taught her how to climb trees with she and kris. dess drove her from school to violin practice. dess would help them lie to carol when noelle skipped, every once in a while, and instead they’d go see a cheap and awful movie. dess bought her ice cream. dess bought her bows. dess treated noelle like a little princess, like some extension of herself. noelle was the part of herself that dess hoped to better, hoped to train to be something better than she is.
kris wouldn’t say much, but they would always think of dearest december holliday like someone mythical. from the moment they’d been adopted into the dreemurr family, dess had made them feel like less of an outsider. because if kris was an outsider, so was dess. there were parts of life neither of their siblings would understand, but they could meet in the middle at. dess taught kris to read sheet music, and how to throw a knife. dess hid knives from kris when they yelled a little too much in the privacy of her bedroom, door locked and wedged shut tight. dess was the sibling kris didn’t think they’d need, in the light asriel shone, dess was a dark corner to lie down in. everyone needs a break from the sun sometimes.
asriel dreemurr would have a lot to say about dess. about her smile, her laugh, the way she spoke. her lips, her ears, her antlers. the piercing he’d watch her do in her bathroom past midnight. the flannels that originated from his closet. azzy would talk about her music, her voice when she sang, her eyes. the freckles on her nose no one could see unless they got close enough to whisper secrets in her ears. the shoebox in her closet where she kept anything deemed important- noelle’s first report card, a polaroid of she and azzy winning festival royalty, his confession letter, kris’ horned headband. he would always think of her as defeats december holliday, love of his life. he’d write volumes for her, about her. he’d talk about winning festival royalty every year, because people thought that they would get married someday. even those who didn’t, even those who thought dess was too sporadic to ever truly settle, still agreed that they’d end up somewhere together some day. people called it fate. people called it puppy love. asriel called it honesty.
all of these things had to be summed up into a few measly words carved into stone, a headstone for an empty grave. they don’t know what happened, or where she’d gone. whether she’d done it herself or if someone else did it. whether it had happened at all. whether she was in plain sight or on a train going a million miles away. whether it was weed, or cigarettes, or a knife.
they did know a few things: dess holliday had disappeared without a trace. she had left behind a dying father, a heartbroken little sister, and a devastated mother. none of the eulogies nor news reports mentioned the lover she’d left behind, the imprint of her last kiss still on his lips, her shoes still in his bedroom, or the kid who hung on her every word wondering if this is who they were destined to become. a missing person’s case, a police report, a tidal wave of grief and tears and then nothing more than a rumor after a few months had passed.
the service was hard to remember. the church was stuffy, not with hot air, but with the breath and whispers and grief of everyone who had crammed themselves into the pews. noelle could hardly breathe nor keep her eyes open, the constant flow of tears since they’d found her bedroom empty and silent draining her of everything she had to give. asriel didn’t feel anything- just some acute form of shock, numbness washing over his body until none of this was real. someone would fix it- carol had a finger in every pie in town. someone had to fix it.
kris looked apathetic to the whole ordeal, but that’s because they could never get their face to make the correct expressions. but a gaze cast down, and there were their palms covered in scabs, from how hard they’d clenched their fists to stop themselves from screaming and going out to find dess themselves. clearly, everyone here was too stupid to do it themselves.
—
black feels wrong. black was dess’s color, not his. not kris’s either.
he straightens his tie the way his father taught him, for his first school dance a million years ago. he vaguely remembers he’d gone with dess, of course. he had gone to every dance of his career with her.
he can see kris behind him in the mirror, a question they won’t ask in their eyes.
“need help?” he asks, his voice thick and tight. they nod. he kneels, with shaking fingers, ties kris’ tie the same way he’d done his. he’d have to show them how to do it themselves before he went to college.
when he’s done, he attempts to stand, but his shoulders are dragged down by a touch so light it almost shocks him to his core.
a hug from kris. a hug that says everything they won’t.