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Of course.
She thinks.
Of course, they wouldn't follow through.
She knows. The thought arrives like it's been sitting there for hours, waiting for her to catch up to it.
There's a rule. There's always been a rule, worn smooth from use, the kind of thing you stop questioning because questioning it might mean admitting you never understood it in the first place.
Noelle does Noelle things, and Kris does Kris things.
She can hear it in Kris's voice, even now, even with Kris nowhere near her. A voice from years ago, steady and certain in a way that made it easy to believe.
That would be crazy.
Noelle and Kris don't do crazy things.
She watches herself say it, watches the girl on the bed nod along like she believes it too, like there isn't a version of tonight already decided somewhere just out of frame, waiting for her to catch on. Even as Noelle lies in her bed, tracing the stitches on her quilt, tracing the snowflakes etched into her blanket.
She knows.
Noelle and Kris do Noelle and Kris things.
Maybe she's crazy for thinking it could have been any different, that they could ever find their way out of the glass display case they've been put in. Maybe she's crazy for thinking there was only one glass wall to push past. Maybe she's crazy for even thinking that Kris had changed at all, maybe they finally grew up, maybe they were the only one out of the two of them to grow out of the absence of their sibling.
Maybe Noelle will always be the weaker one.
Maybe Noelle will have to learn to love the Noelle things she does.
It's what he would have wanted.
She shivers at the idea, already thinking of her father in the past tense isn't something she thought she'd catch onto so easily, yet here she is.
The shivers grow into sniffles, quiet into the quilt that her dad had bought her for Christmas the year that Dess disappeared.
It was simple, a dainty snowflake pattern that was stitched by Father Alvin's mother before she passed last year. She had been trying to sell it at the festival for years, and every year, Noelle asked her mom if she could buy it, and every year, her mom said no, that it was old, too small, she'd grow out of it.
Of course, after losing one daughter, you start to think of all of the times when you wish you never said no to her.
Carol would rather buy Noelle all the gifts in the world than never get the chance to give her anything again.
It was Rudy's idea to purchase it. Carol finally said yes. He insisted on wrapping it himself rather than having Carol's assistant at the town hall wrap it with the rest of the gifts, signing it from everyone, including Dess.
Noelle has slept with it every night since.
Last night, she held it tighter than usual.
Now, her father was gone. The man who taught her to love video games, who bought her every ice cream flavor until she found one she liked the best, who held her as sobs wracked through her body after Dess and her watched a scary Halloween movie, who she dedicated every afternoon to visiting him in the hospital. He'd fallen down, by 6:25 pm, he was gone.
Yet she hasn't cried.
She can't.
Not a tear has left her eyes since she got the call, since she wrung the lake water out of her hair, since she rushed home and collected her mother's panicked figure up in her arms and held her up, since she found herself alone in her room, tracing her quilt with a careful nature she hasn't felt since before her stupid group project even started.
She can't cry.
She wants to, God, she wants to cry for her father.
She wants to cry for her father as she sobbed for her sister, but she just can't keep her mind straight.
Every time she closes her eyes, it's Kris.
Kris' face. Kris' voice. Kris' clothes. Kris' hands. Kris' commands. Kris' strength.
God, she can't even think of the death of her father without first thinking about how Kris was the first person she saw after she found out. Slumped over the picnic table, shivering silently, as if she hadn't felt their hands holding her head above water mere moments before.
She lies there.
Just lies there.
The quilt is warm against her skin, but she doesn't feel warm. She doesn't feel cold either. She doesn't feel much of anything except the distant awareness that she should be feeling something, that there's supposed to be grief here, an ocean of it, but instead there's just...
Static.
White noise where her heart should be breaking.
Her eyes trace the snowflakes stitched into the fabric. One, two, three, four. She's counted them before. She knows there are forty-seven complete snowflakes and three partial ones along the edges where Father Alvin's mother ran out of thread. She's counted them so many times she could draw them from memory.
She wonders if this is what Dess felt like before she disappeared. This hollow feeling. This sense of being a shell with nothing inside.
No.
No, Dess was never hollow. Dess was full. Full of fire and sharpness and the kind of presence that made rooms feel smaller just by entering them. Dess would never lie in bed like this, numb and useless, unable to even cry for her own father.
Noelle closes her eyes.
Kris' hands on her shoulders. Kris' voice, low and certain. The water closing over her head.
She opens them again.
The ceiling stares back at her, blank and white and offering nothing.
She should get up. She should go downstairs. She should-- what? What is she supposed to do? Her mother is at the hospital, dealing with paperwork and arrangements and all the terrible administrative details of death. Noelle offered to come. Her mother said no. Her mother said she needed to rest.
Rest.
As if she could rest. As if she's done anything but rest since she came home and peeled off her damp clothes and crawled into bed and--
Knock knock knock.
The sound jolts through her like electricity.
For a moment, she doesn't move. Can't move. Her body has forgotten how.
Knock knock knock.
Someone's at her door. Her bedroom door. Not the front door, her bedroom door, which means someone is already inside the house, which means--
She sits up. The quilt slides off her shoulders. She's still wearing the same clothes from yesterday, rumpled and creased from sleeping in them. Her hair is a mess. She doesn't care.
"Um," she says, and her voice comes out scratchy and strange. "Come in?"
The door opens.
It's Kris.
Kris.
Standing in her doorway, holding a bouquet of flowers, white lilies and baby's breath and something purple she doesn't recognize, wrapped in crinkly cellophane that catches the light. They're wearing their usual green-and-yellow sweater. Their hair is messy, falling into their eyes. They look...
They look like Kris. Like Kris from yesterday, like Kris from years ago, like Kris she's always and never known.
And suddenly, suddenly, Noelle can feel again.
She can feel like how she felt when the snow passed through her fingertips, when the water lapped at her ankles, when the setting sun beat down upon her.
It hits her like a wave, like breaking through the surface of water and gasping for air. Her chest tightens. Her hands start to shake. There's something hot and sharp behind her eyes, not quite tears but close, closer than she's been since--
"Kris," she breathes.
They don't say anything. Of course they don't. Kris never says much. They just stand there, holding the flowers, looking at her with those dark eyes that never quite give anything away.
But they're here.
They're here and she can feel and oh God, oh God, she didn't realize how much she needed to feel something, anything, even if it's this terrible complicated knot of relief and fear and something else she can't name.
"Come in," she says, too loud, too eager. She's already turning, already moving back into the room, giving Kris no real choice but to follow or stand alone in the hallway holding flowers for no one.
Kris follows. Not eagerly, not quite reluctantly either. They move the way people move when they've already decided a thing is too far gone to argue with.
Noelle takes the bouquet from them before they've fully crossed the threshold, plucking it free with both hands, and doesn't let herself notice, doesn't let herself feel, whatever flickers across Kris's face when she does. Relief, maybe. Or its opposite. She can't tell which, and she doesn't stop long enough to find out.
There's a vase on her dresser already occupied — a loose, wilting arrangement Susie brought that morning, daisies and something yellow, tied with the kind of ribbon that means somebody's mother picked it out. Noelle doesn't think about this. She yanks the daisies free by the stems, lets water run cold down her wrist and drip onto the carpet, and doesn't look at where they land, half under her desk, forgotten before they've finished falling.
She shoves Kris's lilies into the vase two-handed, too fast, stems bending against each other, the cellophane still crinkling around half of them because she hasn't bothered to strip it off. Water sloshes over the lip. She doesn't wipe it up.
She can't let herself look far from Kris for too long; it burns, it hurts, like the burning edge of the sun in an eclipse. She knows they're still there, even if she can't see them.
When she turns around, Kris is sitting on the very edge of her bed. Not in the middle of it. Spine straight, hands folded in their lap, the posture of someone waiting to be told they can leave. Their eyes are on the quilt beneath them, on the door behind her, on anything that isn't Noelle's face.
Something in Noelle's chest drops.
She knows that posture. She's seen it in church pews, in waiting rooms, in the fifteen seconds before somebody says a thing they don't want to say. Kris is uncomfortable. Kris is uncomfortable because of her, because of how she said come in too loud, too eager, because of how she's still standing there with wilted daisy water drying on her hand like it's nothing, like her father isn't--
She moves toward them, and Kris's hand lifts, not to push her away, but to catch her wrist, fingers closing around it with a gentleness that feels like a question. The grip tightens just slightly, holding her there, asking without sound. But they don't let go.
She crosses the room and sits beside them, closer than she needs to, and lets her head fall sideways onto their shoulder before she's decided to do it. Kris goes rigid. Then, slowly, doesn't pull away.
The moment her forehead meets the wool of their sweater, something in her chest cracks open all at once, like a dam finally giving out. Every feeling she couldn't locate in her own body ten minutes ago comes flooding in sideways, borrowed, arriving through Kris instead of through her, and she doesn't understand why, doesn't want to understand why, only knows that she can feel her father's absence now, fully, because Kris's shoulder is warm and solid and here.
"Where's your dad," she says into their sleeve, not lifting her head. "Everyone in town says he just shut himself in the flower shop. That he stopped. But that's not what happened, is it.
Kris says nothing. Kris will not say anything; she understands that now, has always understood it, but the silence has a shape, dense and full, the silence of someone holding a door shut with their whole body.
She lifts her hand and rubs slow circles into Kris's back, the way her father used to do for her, and feels Kris lean, almost imperceptibly, into the pressure of her palm. Whether they mean to or not, she can't say. Maybe their body doesn't care what they mean.
And then she's crying, not for Rudy, whose folded quilt sits behind her bloodless and unremarkable, but for Asgore, for a father she barely knew, taken or not taken, gone in whatever quiet impossible way he's gone. She hates herself distantly, from somewhere far off, for the fact that these are the tears that finally come, that she can grieve so easily for someone else's father and not her own. She keeps rubbing Kris's back anyway. Keeps crying anyway. Stopping would mean asking why.
Kris folds forward. Elbows on knees, head dropping into their hands, hair falling loose over their fingers, and their shoulders begin the smallest kind of shaking, so small she wouldn't have caught it if she weren't already touching them.
Noelle slides closer, curling over their back the way water finds the shape of whatever it's poured into, arms wrapping around their shoulders from behind, cheek pressed between their shoulder blades.
"It's okay," she says. "It's okay. You're going to be okay. We're going to be okay."
She feels Kris's breathing change beneath her, feels it catch, feels the muscles along their spine draw tight again, and she doesn't stop talking. The words come faster now, spilling out of her the way they used to at the edge of the lake, that same reckless certainty rising in her chest like water finding a crack.
"We don't have to just give up," she says. "I was stupid. At the lake, I said we could do crazy things, Kris, that we could be people who did things like that, but I don't think that's true anymore. I think if we should do anything, we should be good, so good, Kris. We can do Kris and Noelle things."
Kris's head lifts slightly. Not toward her. Toward the window, or the wall, or nowhere at all.
"You could be him," she says, and her voice has gone soft and strange, almost tender, almost pleading. "You could be Asriel. The way your mom still sets a plate. The way she still says his name like he's upstairs. And I could be—" Her throat closes around the name before she can finish it, and she forces it out anyway. "I could be Dess. I could stop being whoever I am now and just be her. For everyone. So nobody has to keep waiting."
Something happens in Kris's body that Noelle feels before she understands it, a full flinch, spine snapping straight beneath her palm. They don't pull away, not yet, not all the way, but every muscle along their back goes to wire, and she keeps her arms locked around them the way you'd hold something you already suspect you're about to drop.
For one disorienting second, it isn't her bedroom at all. There's pressure building behind her ears, water closing warm and then cold over the crown of her head, hair heavy and dark and clinging to her cheeks, and somewhere far above the surface someone is shouting her name in Kris's voice, younger, cracked open with fear, the same voice that once told her go, go, get out, go, and she can't tell if she's remembering it or living it again for the first time.
She doesn't stop talking. If anything, the words come faster now, chasing the flinch like they can catch up to it and smooth it back down.
"We were never happy," she says, "just being Kris and Noelle. You know that. I know you know that." She feels Kris's breath stall somewhere high in their chest, and she takes the stalling as an answer, the way she's learned to take everything Kris doesn't say as an answer. "You stopped being Kris a long time ago. That's what happened, isn't it. You went under as Kris and you came back up as... nobody. You've been nobody for so long you don't even flinch at it anymore. But I can feel it, Kris. I can feel the nobody where your name used to be." Her arms tighten. "I can't do that. I can't be nobody too. I won't survive being nobody."
Kris's hands, still folded, press white-knuckled against each other.
"But we don't have to be nobody," she says, and now there's a brightness climbing into her voice that doesn't belong there, feverish and much too eager, the voice of someone building a house out of the only materials left in a burning room. "We could be somebody. We could be somebody together. The two everyone already wants us to be; the town sweethearts, the perfect ones, the ones mothers point to on the street. We could finally be who we always secretly wanted to be, before any of this, before the lake, before either of us got taken apart and put back together wrong."
She presses her forehead harder into their shoulder.
"I'll tell Susie the truth," she says. "I'll be honest with her... that nothing has ever made me feel strong the way you make me feel. Nothing. Not close. And I'll be honest with you too. No more pretending. I promise."
Kris doesn't answer, because Kris never answers, but their breathing has gone slow and careful in the particular way breathing goes when a person is trying very hard not to be heard breathing at all.
"We can disappear," Noelle says, quieter now, almost dreaming it aloud. "Slowly. Like something you fall asleep inside of instead of something that happens to you all at once. We can bury the old Kris and the old Noelle together, put them down soft, like snow over a fence line, and nobody has to watch it happen. We don't have to rush any of it. We can take as long as we need. We can just... go under, a little at a time, and see who's left standing when it's over."
The room has gone very still around them. Across it, the lilies sit crushed and dripping in their vase, and behind them, barely visible, the daisies lie forgotten on the floor where they fell, and the whole space has the hush of a set between takes, lit and waiting, nobody quite sure if the scene is still rolling.
Noelle slides down, slow, until her head comes to rest in Kris's lap, cheek against their knee, eyes closing before she's decided to close them.
For a long moment, nothing. Then Kris's hand lifts from where it sat frozen in their own lap, and settles into her hair.
Their fingers move slowly, unevenly, the motion of someone performing a gesture they've only ever seen done to somebody else, careful, deliberate, like they're following instructions written on the inside of their own skull. Noelle feels the apology in it before she understands there's one to feel; it's there in the too-gentle weight of their palm, in the way their hand pauses every few strokes as if catching itself doing something it hadn't agreed to.
"We can talk when you've slept," Kris says, Kris who was last seen on her balcony a few nights earlier, Kris so quiet it barely disturbs the air, the first words they've given her all night, and the sound of their own voice seems to startle them almost as much as it startles her...
Noelle doesn't move. She lets her eyes stay closed, lets the words sit somewhere behind her ribs without asking what they mean.
"I'm sorry," Kris says, after a while, and then, like it needs saying separately, like it's a different apology than the first one, "about your dad."
The hand at the back of her skull hasn't moved. It's still just resting there, the exact stillness of something deciding whether it's holding her down or keeping her from floating away.
"You can't say stuff like that," Kris says. Their voice cracks somewhere in the middle of it, not from volume but from the effort of pushing it out at all, like each word has to be carried up from somewhere Kris would rather leave it. They stop. Their fingers keep moving through her hair anyway, steady, contradicting whatever their mouth is trying to do.
Noelle opens her eyes.
She looks up at Kris from where her head rests in their lap, chin tilted back, throat bared, and her face has arranged itself into something soft and open and pleading, an expression built entirely around a question she doesn't say out loud: tell me I'm right. Tell me we can be this. Tell me you'll stay long enough to become it with me. It is not an innocent look. It knows exactly what it's asking for, even if the part of her that built it doesn't. It is the kind of look that could make the strongest of poets set down their pen and simply stare, unable to find the line that follows it, because there isn't one... because a look like that isn't asking to be described, it's asking to be answered.
Kris doesn't answer it. Their hand keeps moving through her hair, slow and careful and apologetic, and their eyes go somewhere over Noelle's head, toward the door, toward the window, toward anywhere that isn't the shape of her face waiting to be given what it wants.
The room stays dim and staged and unmoving around them, and neither of them says anything else, and neither of them leaves.