Chapter Text
Early one morning, long before any sane person was awake, a hatch was pulled open.
With trembling limbs, Kris Dreemurr climbed the rickety step ladder leading into his family’s dingy attic. He was just tired. That’s why he was shaking.
It took all the will in his soul to break out into a coughing fit when his head crossed the boundary into the house’s highest room. The attic was so filled with dust that Kris could chew the air if he tried.
Kris pulled up his t-shirt around his nose to filter out the hazardous air. The sun itself hadn’t quite risen, though its light still shone through the tiny square window on the far side of the attic, serving the human’s guide through the cluttered room.
Boxes filled to bursting with scarfs, sweaters, and other half finished sewing projects occupied most of the space. Kris was surprised that they only rose up to his knees. Considering the rate at which his mother worked, Kris ought to have been completely submerged in the containers.
A strange shape stood out amidst the darkness. Its cylindrical base supported a tall, thin poll that ended in a strange circle with six indents on its circumference.
It was a metal flower and pot.
Though he could only see its silhouette, Kris knew that its yellow and green paint was chipped and peeling. It had been that way for a while now. Since before…
Kris hadn’t even noticed that he was reaching for the artificial greenery.
“Should I give it back?” he thought.
With great effort, the young man pulled his arm away, and continued trudging towards the window.
“Later.”
Kris’ objective was nestled between a wicker basket full of wax candy canes, and a vase with a crack at its base. It was a small, plastic bin, with a black latch-on lid and some tape stuck to its side labeled: Photo Albums.
After kneeling down, Kris struggled to unclasp the top, before wrenching it open with a resounding snap. The human’s shoulders tensed as he hunched over, and pointed his wide crimson eyes towards the hatch behind him.
He wasn’t too afraid of being punished; rather, Kris feared that Toriel would join him in reminiscing.
Kris needed to be alone.
Once certain that his mother wasn't coming, a shuddering breath exited Kris’ mouth through his teeth, and he gazed back down at the piles of laminated memories.
Kris gently extracted three large binders and placed them at his sides, before spotting something at the bottom of the bin. It was a bright red booklet, and so thin that it barely counted as a pamphlet.
On its front was taped a blurry picture of child Kris, his expression one of abject confusion, and the shot angled such that you could look up his nose. Beneath the picture, scrawled in barely legible handwriting were the words: Kris’s Photo’s.
Seeing the miniature album filled Kris’ muscles with a homely warmth, like someone had just lit a fireplace right next to him.
He gently lifted the booklet from the bin, and opened it to the first page. The photographs found within were smudged with age and fingerprints. They weren’t laminated; since Kris didn’t have the patience for such a thing, and wanted to hastily tape them into the binder as quickly as possible.
The first few pictures were all selfies of Kris, blurred by motion and the aforementioned damage, rendering the human a chaotic mess of green, yellow, and brown splotches, with a small dash of red on top. Those must have been his horns.
Kris snickered at his first few attempts at composition. It reminded him of those posts online of old people trying to work a camera. And when Toriel attempted it now that he thought about it.
The pictures on the next page had a spattering of random subjects, one of which was a bleary eyed Asriel squinting at the frame. Kris had thought that it would be hilarious to wake up his brother at 3 A.M. by flashing him in the face with a camera.
It was; subsequent chase around the house notwithstanding.
Kris turned the page, and the air around him seemed to cleanse itself from dust and debris. Each and every photograph brought him back, if only a little.
He saw Mom ‘experimenting’ with pies, coating herself and the entire kitchen in big blobs of batter, and dusting every visible surface in a noticeable layer of flour. Another showed Dad elbow deep in the garden, overalls covered in mud as he dug after the lily eating pests of long ago with a religious fervor.
It had pleased Kris endlessly to document others during times of distress but they had always managed to laugh about it after the fact. Gathering around Kris’ camera at the end of the day was one of the few activities the family was able to share before…
Kris quickly turned another page, and his heart skipped a beat.
Distorted though the images may be, Kris’ memories have festered in the back of his mind for quite some time, and were more than enough to fill in the blanks. Each and every picture jumped out of their frames, enveloping him and stimulating all five senses.
Although some of the pictures had Kris present in them, the entirety of the binder’s latter half was dedicated to Noelle Holiday.
Laughter like church bells rang in his ears as he beheld a picture taken on Christmas morning. The doe was smiling out at him through time and space, tightly hugging a new stuffed puppy around its scrawny neck.
Kris’s knuckles grew wet and cold as he saw another of his outstretched hand, a shiny stone resting in his palm and a starry eyed deer gazing down at it in awe. He and Noelle had gone treasure hunting in the creek west of town, and he had to dig around the riverbed for ten whole minutes before finding his prize.
The cold of winter pierced the open air, landing like needles on his cheeks as Kris and Noelle marched through snow so high it reached their knees. The grown ups might have owned the streets and buildings, but the towering trees and rushing rivers that surrounded Hometown were theirs .
It belonged to them.
Kris greedily flipped though the remainder of the pages, the sensations of times long past flooding every nerve. The smell of brambles and butterscotch pie. The feeling of smooth, hoof-clad fingers intertwined with his own. The sound of Santa Claus… dying.
A very large, very deep pit began to form in the depths of Kris’ stomach. The picture that had elicited this reaction was nestled in the bottom left corner of the final page. In it, a distressed Noelle was trying and failing to pull the lid off of a toy Santa’s battery compartment.
Kris had superglued the compartment shut, resulting in Mr. Claus’ slow, painful death.
The human turned to the previous page, hoping to bury the memory, only to find more.
Noelle sneezing after some ashes from the fireplace were tossed in her face.
Noelle screaming after finding one of her toys nailed to the wall of her room with several tacks.
Noelle—teary eyed and soaking wet—gazing at the camera after a water bucket precariously placed atop a door fell onto her head.
Each of these ‘pranks’ were performed by none other than Kris Dreemurr. The human hadn’t noticed the pictures while going through the binder the first time; or rather, he didn’t want to. Some weren’t all bad. He’d surprise the doe with the occasional whoopee cushion or hand buzzer.
But he had crossed the line far too often, which was doing it at all.
He had hurt her.
Kris slammed the binder shut, only now realizing how hard his breathing had become. He began loading the photo albums back into their bins, his mind wandering off as he did so.
Why had he come here? Was it just to hurt?
No, it was because of Tenna, the friend Kris never knew he had.
Fighting the Darkner had left Kris wanting, and journeying to the past provided him with a revelation of sorts.
The only reason Tenna had fought Kris at all, the reason he went so far as to kidnap Toriel, was because he wouldn’t let go.
He was stuck and sinking, and rather than get unstuck he opted to drag everyone else down with him in some crazed attempt to put everything back the way it was.
And so would Kris.
With the bins neatly tucked back into their original spot, the human trudged back towards the hatch.
It would be hard trying to avoid her.
Kris climbed down the latter, limbs trembling worse than before.
It would be hard not looking her in the eye.
The young Dreemurr slowly folded the latter back into place, before creeping down the hall and into his bedroom.
It would be hard aching all over whenever she was close, whenever he heard her, or whenever the topic of little Miss Holiday even dared to enter the same plane of existence as he.
Kris threw himself onto his bed, and finally allowed a single tear to march down his cheek.
It would be hard, but it would be worth it.
As the human’s breathing slowed, his mind began to wander on its way to sleep.
Whatever the future had in store for Kris, it couldn’t be all bad. He had Susie after all. And Ralsei. And many, many Darkners who considered him a hero.
But without Noelle it wouldn’t be the same. Not ever.