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Noelle giggles in the back pew of the church. Old enough to sit by themselves through service, old enough to mumble through the hymnals.
Kris can’t stop whispering jokes to her about the sermon, about what people wear, about their neighbors. Especially about Dess and Asriel, who hold hands when they think Carol isn't looking. It’ll come up over lunch.
They make a paper crane out of a pamphlet, its feathers a pattern of sans serif and bleeding colored ink. Noelle cups it in her lap.
-
Kris studies Noelle from across the library. She hasn’t changed a day. Her nose is the same, her face, her laugh. They want to reach out to her.
They can’t.
She’s just so perfect, like she sprouted upward from the loss instead of wilting like the Dreemurr kids did. They wonder if she even still thinks about it, then kicks themself.
Of course she still thinks about it.
They want to crack open her skull and study it, get to know her front and backwards and completely. Like they did when they were kids.
“What’re you staring at?” Susie asks, and they shake their head silently, gesturing for her to let it go.
Some things are meant to be kept inside, bottled, and corked. Noelle was once theirs, but she isn’t anymore. She isn’t anything to them. They have to let it go.
-
“You’ll be okay,” Kris mumbles to Noelle, holding her tighter. “I won’t go anywhere.”
Dess had been gone for three months now. Their dad had officially stepped down as police chief in the wake of the case running cold. Kris still sleeps in their brother’s bed every night, wakes up into the darkness of glow-in-the-dark stars with his arms wrapped firmly around them. Sometimes he’s the only one who understands.
“Shh,” he’ll whisper into their hair. “I’m not going anywhere, sibling. Go back to sleep. I’ve got you.”
So Kris whispers the same things to Noelle, as her little body shivers with the lingering images behind her eyes. They hope their voice chases away the nightmares of police lights flashing through the bedroom window, the look of an empty bedroom, a locked door. A cold case and an honorary funeral, and a stricken expression on Kris’ face as the people Noelle considered strong and unshakeable sob and shatter downstairs.
-
Noelle doesn’t remember when she and Kris stopped talking. Maybe when they started hiding from everyone the way Dess did. Maybe when she couldn’t stop squirming when they were around, because she was terrified. She didn’t know what to do right this time to stop them from leaving.
-
“Hi, Elly,” Asriel says, false and cheerful. Most of his side of the room is packed up for college. Noelle had come to tell him goodbye, but she doesn’t know how to.
“Hi, Azzy,” she breathes in the doorway. She can’t take any steps further, into the bedroom she’d been in a hundred times.
“Oh, c’mere, kid,” he sighs, dropping into a squat and holding out his arms. He sees a few tears leak from her eyes. He’s used to it; she’d always been a little more sensitive than Kris. Asriel had always been the second sibling to her, when Dess wasn’t around. He’d felt some sort of kinship with her, growing up sensitive of soul.
He strokes her ears gently as she squeezes him. A hug that says a lot, from such a tiny person.
“I’m gonna miss you,” she whispers to him.
“I’ll miss you too, Elle.”
“No, really miss you…you’re like my big brother,” she whimpers. “What do I do when you’re not next door?”
He wishes he could refer her to her big sister, say that Dess will always be there for her.
But she isn’t.
He says nothing, instead. Noelle still thinks the world of Dess. Thinks one day she’ll come home. He can’t bear to break her heart, can’t bear to say how selfish it was to leave everything behind (wherever she is, whether she’s dead or alive is no matter).
-
“I want my character to have ice powers,” Noelle says, kicking her legs on the chair she sits in and dressing a doll.
“Then mine will have fire powers, so we can fight,” Kris says, with a mischievous tone in their voice. They don’t really care what their doll wears. She has two different shoes on. Noelle frowns.
“But I don’t want to fight,” she says.
“But I do,” Kris says, then pounces on her. She shrieks, then giggles.
-
Kris never announces when they’ll come over. They just show up in Noelle’s doorway.
“Krismas!” she chirps. They smile faintly, and go curl into ‘their’ corner of the Holliday’s couch.
Angel, she loves them more than she loves anything on this earth.
-
Kris goes back to the night December disappeared frequently.
Not because she’s gone, even if she is, but because this is about them just as much as it’s about her. They just can’t find the words to tell people about it.
Something changed that night- not the dynamic, not the Hollidays, but Kris. Something inside of them. It’s been marred for the rest of their life.
Maybe it’s their brain, seeing the darkness of the shelter, and not remembering anything after that until they ‘came to’ and Dess was just…gone. Maybe it was Noelle, the way she didn’t understand what was going on but knew. Or the way Asriel sobbed in his bed that night. They’d padded down the hall and slept between their parents, and even in their warmth and surrounded by the smell of their fur, they didn't feel safe. If Dess could go missing, they would never feel safe again.
Maybe it’s because that’s the day they stopped feeling like a real person, and stopped feeling like it was them living in their body.
That’s the night they stopped talking.
Every moment of the night has imprinted itself into their brain. A short list of the memories that haunt them in full, quaking detail:
- “It’ll just be us,” Dess says, her car idling in the Dreemurr’s driveway. Kris swallows, and glances at Asriel’s sleeping body. Dess looks afraid, and maybe stoned. Kris agrees anyway, because they love her.
- The way the crickets were chirping too loud. And how nothing else made a sound but them.
- Running in a blind panic, feet beating the ground, hearing nothing but their own heartbeat. Wishing Dess was holding their hand and explaining why it had all happened. Wanting their mom. Wanting their dad. Wanting their brother.
- Screaming and crying in the ambulance, shaking like a leaf in the wind despite Toriel’s arms wrapped around them. Clawing red welts into their pale skin to try and get their hands to still, and stop the panic from bubbling like a pot overflowing. Asriel trying to tell them it would all be okay, but the panic in his eyes betraying that. His big paws stoping theirs from scratching, or hitting. Asgore speaking gruffly into the walkie talkie clipped to his uniform, then speeding off in a blur of blue sirens.
- “Tell me what you saw, Kris, please,” Asgore says, kneeling next to them in the white room equipped only with a metal table. He offers a green crayon to their shaking, human hand. “Tell daddy what you saw.”
- The last time they ever saw Carol Holliday cry.
- The first time they’d ever seen their brother yell at their father. Scream at him. Call him names no one ever should have said. And not being sorry about it.
-
“Dess?” they call.
They don’t see her. Asshole, leaving them here, in the woods, alone. They could be lost for all she knows.
“Dess?” they call again, nervous about the lack of response. The door of the bunker is creeping closer.
And then the screams start. Blood curdling screams, ceaseless, and everywhere.
Kris doesn’t know what happens, they just know they tripped. Pain shoots through their elbow, their head.
“Dess!” they scream, trying to find their way back up through blurry vision. “Dess, where are you?”
The screams aren’t stopping, but now that they’re closer, they hear the whimpers too. Pleading for help, but Kris hardly knows where they themself are, much less where her screams are coming from.
They scream, too, a symphony. Maybe calling out for help, or for their sister.
When they come back alive, everything hurts, and they’re trembling. Somehow their dad had come, found them, and is holding them to his chest. They want to wriggle out- because they still can’t find Dess.
“Kris? Kris,” he says, facing them towards himself. He’s obviously distraught. Kris vaguely wonders where Azzy and Mama are. “Where is Dess?”
They shrug weakly, helplessly. What a question.
“Where is Dess?” he repeats, more insistently. “We found her car. Where is she?”
They only crumple into the front of their father’s uniform, sobbing breathlessly.
-
Noelle can’t touch her room. It’s been years and she still can’t even approach it.
The sheets her sister didn’t sleep in the night she disappeared.
The last of her fingerprints coating every surface. The hairbrush that had been moved for a DNA sample. Noelle had screamed and kicked when she’d seen the detective and her mother opening the door, insisting that Dess hated people in her room. When she came back, she’d know people came in. They can’t move anything.
Noelle has to protect it for her. She’d promised.
-
“Why can’t you fucking find her?” Asriel yells, pounding his fists on the Holiday’s kitchen table again. “It’s not that hard! She couldn’t have gone far!”
“Asriel, honey-” Toriel tries, her paw inching towards his shoulder. He shrugs her off preemptively.
“No, don’t try and convince me otherwise. No one in this fucking town is trying hard enough! I will go out there myself and find her if you all are too stupid to do your jobs!”
Asgore’s face hasn’t changed, in the wake of this tirade. Asriel wishes it would.
“Listen, Noelle is upstairs bawling her eyes out. My little sibling was found alone in the middle of the woods, screaming and bleeding and crying, and no one seems to give a shit!”
“They’re safe upstairs,” Toriel murmurs.
“Yeah? So was Dess, two hours ago!”
“Dess was mentally ill,” Asgore begins. “Volatile-”
“Oh, don’t you fucking start,” Asriel snaps. “I know she had issues. I probably know more than any of you. But I know that she wouldn’t have run away- not with Kris in the car with her. That’s ridiculous. You’re all acting like you didn’t spend seventeen years with her too!”
“People can change at the drop of the hat in this state-”
“Not Dess! Look, I’m telling you. Suicidal people, runaways, they don’t plan their futures! She had finally decided on what she wanted to do after graduation- she was excited! Does that sound like someone who’s going to throw it all away?”
“Sweetheart-”
“You people are insane. You’re ignoring what’s right in front of you!” Asriel spits, looking his father dead in the eye. “I’m going to check on Noelle and Kris, since everyone seems to forget one of them lost a sister tonight, and the other their idol. Let me know when you get your heads out of your asses.”
-
“C’mon, Kris!” Noelle yells over her shoulder in a voice like ringing bells, like Christmas carols. They follow her like a dog.
They’re young. Their mom had put a bandaid on their knee that morning, and Asriel had tied their shoes for them. Nothing has gone wrong yet.
-
Kris doesn’t know what to call what’s between them and Susie. Someone who had fallen into their life haphazardly, and simply hadn’t left. Kris thanks the Angel every day for that, for the chalk.
They hadn’t had many friends throughout their life, so maybe this is friendship, but they don’t think so. From what they know, briefly, friends don’t hold hands. Friends don’t have this sort of ease-of-comfort, at least not the way they and Susie do, with hardly any barriers between the two of them. Friends share secrets; they share scars from Darkworlds. Friends don’t wear each other’s clothes, sleep in the same bed, have this strange sense of domestic ease around them.
And even compared to how they are friends with Ralsie, this is different. The closest thing they can think of is what it’s like to be around Noelle, but that’s undefinable too. They don’t know what to name who she is, either. To be fair, Kris was there the night Noelle’s sister disappeared. Kris had held Noelle as sobs wracked her body and she cried for a sister that wasn’t there. Kris had seen Noelle grow up right before their own eyes.
So maybe Asriel and Dess are the closest thing to what they and Susie have, but that doesn’t work either. Azzy and Dess were something entirely unnamable, like they and Noelle’s pseudo-parents in the midst of a fracturing marriage on one side and chronic illness and career politics on the other. Dess and Azzy were only ever ‘best friends’, but Kris knows better than to compare them and Susie to whatever that was. Dess and Asriel’s souls were tied together, for life, with a red string that one day just…ran out. The spool had been pulled dry, they suppose, and then Asriel had to just move on.
So they’re just friends, shakily put. So close, in fact, Kris finds Susie’s clothes in their dresser. Even if Susie and Noelle have this thing going for them- flirting, really, and nothing more yet- and it puts Kris in a weird spot because they don’t know how to define either of them. They’re into each other, yet with Kris, there’s always something tender and a line being toed. It’s not a “crush”, it’s some form of friendship gone ashtray, it’s silent attraction that quells in their gut.
Angel, they wish Asriel were here.
–
“I missed you,” Noelle says, and Kris wishes they could say everything.
They just nod.
Her hand inches impossibly closer to theirs.
And it’s all falling apart in front of their eyes. Noelle’s sweet face is unravelling them.
-
“What even are we, dude?” Susie laughs, pushing Kris’ shoulder a little bit. They laugh, too, and keep looking up into her face.
It’s an absurd situation they’ve been put into- a lot of ‘you won’t’ and then the proof they will, leaving Susie’s weight pressing into Kris’ hips and them laughing into each other’s faces. And they’ve never wanted anything more.
So Kris does it: they stop being a pussy, and they kiss Susie, and she kisses them back. Her teeth graze at their lips, and it’s intoxicating, and all they want is more.
And all they want is Noelle to have her like this too, and all they want is to watch her do this, and all they want is to do this to her. They want to give them both the world.
Susie’s hands are a strange sort of warm, like she’s borrowing it from Kris, as one slides under their hair onto their neck and the other cradles their lower back closer. They let out a small ‘mmph’ as her tongue comes into their mouth, and they wonder where she learned all of this.
Whoever it is has their eternal gratitude.
“We’re whatever we want,” they mumble.
–
“Nah, we’re just friends,” Susie says flippantly, waving a clawed hand while gripping a game controller in the other. Noelle looks- puzzled?- but doesn’t push further.
Friends feels like exactly the name for it, but what changed is exactly what a friend is. A friend, between the two of them, is the only person in the world who borrowed heat and vulnerability that’s only for Susie. Something in her eyes they’ve never seen anywhere- except for Noelle, when she giggles, when she brushes her fur, when she playfully punches their shoulder.
One of these days, they’re going to cave, and one of them is going to have to tell her.
–
“I thought…you and Susie..?” Noelle whispers into the darkness of the Holiday living room. Kris only shrugs.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
It’s so quiet. It’s one word, and it’s the invite they didn’t know they were waiting for.
“Susie and I have…gone through different things. But you’re both of ours, in different ways.”
If you want to be, they want to tack on. They don’t.
Noelle smiles. Her lips are sweet and warm on their cheek, their forehead, their nose. Her red nose rests in the crook of their neck, where it’s always belonged.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Then show me how I’m yours.”
–
Noelle’s room feels so empty now. Well, obviously, because all of its contents are stuffed into boxes.
“So, I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” she says, airily, but Kris knows why she says it- answering a question they didn’t verbalize. They nod. Something puckers on her face, but she rights it quickly, and doesn’t say anything else.
Except, when Kris opens their arms. A move they so rarely pull. Even as kids, they had been hard pressed to even smile for photos. They’re not an affectionate person, and that’s okay, but still…it’s always been a thing for Noelle; she’s just such an affectionate person that their seeming indifference has always made her doubt herself. Not until that night, the night it all went wrong, do they think they ever wanted comfort.
She sinks into their embrace, nonetheless. Probably the last for a while- until Christmas? Midterms? She doesn’t know.
It’s not a cursory hug, either- it’s deep. Noelle feels it in her bones. It reminds her of a lot of things. It’s a reminder that even if they don’t talk like they used to, even if they can’t name what’s between them and Susie and Ralsei, that they can still come back to each other.
“Love you,” they whisper into her curls, and she thinks she imagines it.
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” she says. The implication is there:
I’ll be home for you, Krismas Dreemurr. Hometown will always be ours. No one else is getting lost out here.