Archive of Our Own

Bzzt bzzt bzzt. Their phone buzzes again and again in their hand. Gripped so hard. Maybe it’ll shatter. Shows no signs of it yet but they’ve broken sharper things with less. Mirrors. Limbs. The heavy sides of the body they exist in. Their mother’s heart, presumably.

Their own heart. Soul. Iterations of the same thing. Heart-shaped soul. Soul-shaped heart. Both thick and bloody and keeping this body alive, despite their best efforts.

Sometimes they can still taste the gunk of it that peeled off under their fingernails. Stains they can’t ever wash away.

Bzzt bzzt bzzt. They don’t even know why they took it with them. Really they don’t remember much of the days and weeks and months that led them here. The Before is bright and vivid and then—

And then.

They trace the edge of their cracked screen. Fractured bits of glass brush against their skin, though never enough to split it. They’ve tried. Mostly blood just makes them woozy. Oozing and staining everything it touches. Some unmistakable reminder of just what body they’ve found themself living in.

Bzzt bzzt bzzt.

They turn their phone off and stare out the car window.

The scenery hasn’t changed in the hours they’ve been on the road. Two-lane highway. They’ve maybe seen six cars total. Lined with unkempt grass and dead wildflowers and scrubby pines that’ll be cut down in a year or two. Underneath them the car rumbles and the road blurs lines of white and gray and black, all mottled bleeding nonsense.

They say, and their voice scrapes in their throat, “why did you even want me to come?”

Dess says nothing at all. When Kris’s eyes flicker to her she’s got her gaze steadfast on the road before them, not that there’s much to see. Blue sky, darkening to black. The moon’s out, a waning crescent clawed across the sky, earlier than it should be. Dess’s form is darker than the leather of the car. Than the steering wheel. Than their own shadow cast across the window.

She isn’t entirely like the Roaring Knight they remember. For one, she’s lost her bat. Swallowed up by the darkness and never returned to her. The blade of it cut into their shoulder through their armor, left behind a mark even in the Light World, though of course now the Light World, like the Dark World beneath it, doesn’t really exist anymore. Though they wouldn’t be able to tell from out here. Highways and grasses and Dess, sat across from them. She had to stoop to make it into the car, her mother’s car, the keys she spun around and hucked up at Kris’s window to wake them up, phasing directly through their wall with her shadowstatic form, like a radio station just out of distance. Her antlers are ink-black and cut into the roof of the car, there-but-not, and it gives Kris a headache if they look too hard. The only bits of them that are solid is the jewelry she’s twisted about them, beaded things Noelle made her.

Noelle slipped one such bracelet under Kris’s bedroom door, too, that first month after the end of the end of the world. Patterned in the same color of their sweater. They bunched it up and shoved it in the back of their sock drawer.

Their head throbs and they twist back to look out the window.

They never used to get headaches around Dess. Or maybe they just never noticed them. Life was muffled, Before. Still is. But then the pain scabbed over quicker. All the days bled together around one singular point. I am going to get Dess back, and then I won’t have to do anything ever again. Every wrong inch of the body. Every heavy beat of the soul. All tuned to one singular purpose. After, I won’t have to exist here ever again.

Now Dess’s warbly static is the only sound in the car. She never turned on the radio and Kris made no moves to do it for her. She used to have an mp3 player but it was lost with her, and stayed lost even when she returned. CDs, but of course none of them are in her mom’s car. Kris isn’t even sure if it has a CD player anymore. At some point Aunt Carol got a new one.

“It’s not going to work,” they say. “You don’t even have a driver’s license.”

Wordlessly, a bit of plastic is jabbed into their arm. Kris picks it up.

It’s washed in faded colors, the license, probably some state-related symbol, not that Kris could remember what that might be. Black text on a color background. Printed upon it is all the usual information. Address, height, weight, eye color. Name: December Holiday. Sex: F. Date of Birth: 12/25/19XX. Species: Human.

Her photo is not good. Asriel always used to tell them there was no such thing as a good driver’s license photo, and so they should stop making fun of his for having his eyes half-closed. Of course these days they don’t talk to Asriel much at all.

Dess’s photo captures absolutely nothing about the Dess they remember. The Dess of their childhood was—electric. Towering. She’d grin down at them and they’d beam right back, scrambling up trees after her, giggling in their shared swiftness. Her antlers were red most of the year but blue around the holidays, fitted into her crop of messy black hair, streaky with dye. In their last memories of her it was a fading crimson. She had no fur but her skin was a similar shade of brown to theirs, if a few tones lighter.

The Dess of the picture has dark hair. No antlers. Scowling at the camera.

They told me I couldn’t wear any hats, she’d told them the day she came home with it, air-quotes around the final word. Because they’d need to identify me if I got mangled in a car crash or something. Like, what the hell, right? I’d be all gore anyways. If you won’t bother to get my species right at least let me keep my fucking antlers.

Kris had gripped her arm tighter. I don’t want them to do that to me.

She’d softened. I know, firebrand. Don’t worry. I can drive you wherever you want to go. I did it for the both of us.

Kris sets the driver’s license and the memories aside, looks back up at Dess. Shadow and tar and ichor. Static fizzes around her edges, her too-long limbs. The car was not made to fit her, though it was made to fit her mother, so really her antlers only clip through the roof a little bit. And look at that, they have a skylight. Kris hadn’t even noticed. Above them the clouds are dark and angry. Dess’s darkness is vivid against them. Like a hole cut through reality.

She looks like the sort of monster humans write scary, vaguely-speciest horror movies about.

“If you weren’t going to let me die,” they tell her, “you could’ve at least left me behind.”

The static shrieks and squeals. She can’t talk; they know this. Not while driving, not without writing her words down, and while she can understand their Sign she’s not managed to string together more than two sentences in a row since coming back. Just the crackle and hiss of whatever void now makes her up, swallowed up the Dess of her old driver’s license photo, and allowed her to come back, distinct, different, while Kris clawed their way through the same sort of hell and changed not at all.

They sink down further in their seat. Static pops and bends the shape of the world around Dess.  “Whatever.”

Dess drives on. They don’t know if she cares. They don’t think it really matters.

They watch their phone slide onto the floor and underneath the seat, and they make no moves to pick it back up.

It started four hours ago.

Well. Probably it started before that. Between the end of the world and the beginning of somehow surviving it. Between Dess vanishing, and something not that Dess-shaped coming back. Between their aunt’s hand heavy on their shoulder, and a human soul like a leash around their neck.

Really, Kris thinks, it started when they turned sixteen, two weeks after the end of the world.

They’d never expected to make it to sixteen, of course. Some impossibility of an age. Monsters lived past sixteen all the time, but they were not a monster. Humans did, but they were not that, either. The creatures they were closest to were hunted to extinction and killed in traps and really, making it to fifteen was being greedy. Those years were supposed to belong to Dess.

But they made it. Had a party and everything, in what was left of Castle Town. The end of the world had smushed Light and Dark together, overlapping spaces, so their school had a crumbling castle sticking out through it and Castle Town’s streets vanished off to nowhere. They remember nothing of it beyond faint snippets of memory, less coherent story and more water through their fingers. The way Susie’s smooth scales pressed up against them. Tucking her shed ones in their palm, to watch them dazzle in the light, Dark World-pink from one angle, Light World-purple another. Noelle hugging their arm like they were six and creeping together into places they were not supposed to go. Ralsei’s mis-matched outfits, borrowed from Noelle and Susie in kind.

The way Dess stood like a silhouette against the brightest light, pure dark-shadow, though her edges were lit golden, and she looked nothing at all like the Dess they had lost, and she looked more herself than she ever had before.

That night they shut themselves up in their room and stopped bothering to leave.

They weren’t supposed to make it through the end. This they knew; this was obvious to everybody except those who had bothered to try and save them. They couldn’t piece it together. What about them was so deserving of outreached hands, or soft touches, or the press of another warm body against the one they resided in, like there wasn’t something alien and wrong that beat on still in their chest, wormed its way into their heart and made a home there.

Dess was the only person who ever came to visit them, and that was just because things like walls and physics weren’t things she bothered with, and besides, Susie hadn’t yet figured out how to summon her axe in this new world. After a time they were able to tune out the voices of their friends, of Susie, Ralsei, Noelle, and though they knew in some distant way that the trio never stopped sitting outside their door, any words they spoke became static and meaningless.

Not Dess, though. Of course she didn’t speak—something to do with her newly monstrous form—but she filled up notebook after notebook, sat with them on the floor. She wrote often of leaving, and little about the years she’d spent gone. She fought loudly with her mother, static shrieking that squealed in Kris’s ears, whenever Carol came by the Dreemurr house to try and convince Dess to come home. Fought with Asriel, too, until she chased him right out of town, or so claimed Asriel in his angry two a.m. texts to a Kris who left him on read. Dess’s illegible scrawls probably told a different story.

She spent more time in their house than her own, Dess did, though never in a way seen by their mom. Instead she came in through the windows, phased directly through the outside walls, with a fritz to her edge like TV-static, immaterial. She wrote; Kris read it sometimes, and ignored it others. Mostly, they spent their days lying there alongside her, hating the cool press of her shadowskin against their own, thin and drab and still naked of anything they’d ever wanted. Never growing in fur like their family. And of course they weren’t so lucky to be swallowed by the void and emerge, or luckier and never be seen again.

It was Dess’s hand which pulled them out of the darkness, though they hadn’t recognized it as such. The Roaring Knight had both been Dess and been someone else entirely—in its shadow Kris struggled to falter. The hand that reached for them was not the furless, smooth one of Dess’s, with her nails always chewed down, broken bits of polish like a scab, because Noelle always liked to paint them ever if she knew it wouldn’t ever last. It was pure shadow and darker-than-dark. The edges of it whispered.

They had never been good at saying no to Dess.

In those months they saw Dess more than they saw their friends, though friend was a stretch. None of them had ever talked about the end of the world, about Kris’s sword turned on them, about their aunt and the Knight and every other betrayal of theirs. About the soul that pounded in their chest, that stayed there, even when the world ended. Sometimes they took it out and bit at it until their entire face went muzzy. But its luster never diminished.

They learned of Ralsei’s transition to girlhood via text, though if she’d told them from the other side of their bedroom door it’s not like they would’ve been able to hear her. Wondered, sometimes, in the dim hours of the night, how Noelle and Susie’s budding romance was going, where Ralsei was sleeping, if school even still happened when its building didn’t exist in the same way anymore. What the three of them might talk about. How Noelle fit into the empty space they’d left behind. But it was a small space, really. She’d make something much better than they ever could.

A trio, always. But never their own.

They took Dess’s leftover sheets of paper, whatever conversation they’d been used in long over, and scribbled out pictures of their friends, though the details were always wrong: they couldn’t remember the exact slope of Ralsei’s muzzle, patterns of Noelle’s fur, the shape of Susie’s teeth.  Sometimes they curled up against their door and squeezed their eyes shut. Imagined at someone on the other side.

But they only ever sat with Dess. There was no reason to turn on a light: they were pretty sure Dess could see in the dark, and they got used to it. The soul beat in their chest. Dess’s edges were darkness and shadow and every time they looked at her they thought monster, which had been true when they were a kid, too. But now it only went one way. She is a monster, and I look like her, so I’m a monster! Now it went like this: she is a monster, and I’ve never looked like her at all. It settled as hatred like the soul in their chest, and they hoped she hated them in turn, for bringing her back to this cage she fought so long to break free of.

These were always the words at the tip of their tongue, no matter what it was she wrote during their one-sided conversations: have you not gotten everything you ever wanted?

When she threw the keys through their window they picked them up and let the sharp edge bite into their fingers. Dess entered, cocky and proud, already flipping to a pre-written page of her notebook, this one patterned with holly, and they knew she’d stolen it from her mother’s office. Want to get out of this fucking town?

Kris had said nothing at all. Looked to her, to their phone, upside-down on their dresser. It had buzzed itself halfway off. They had not bothered to leave their bed in a week. They smelt of animal and sweat. The jacket they had tugged around them was one of Dess’s, that she had upended onto their bed on one of her visits, her only explanation a sticky-note stuck to it: you’ll get more use of it than me now.

Her shape had charged far beyond the shape of whom the jacket was made for.

“How long?” Their voice croaked.

She shrugged, flipped to the next page, where she’d already written, ‘til I come up with a better idea.

They stood. Slipped their phone into their pocket, picked a random assortment of clothing off their floor, and placed their hand into hers. She fizzed against them. Some sort of excitement. It was a sound they’d never heard from her before.

When she led them out the window they didn’t even think to look back.

And now here they were on the road.

Kris sinks into the present moment: their cheek against the window, the rumble of the car underneath, and Dess, Dess, Dess, the ever-present blot of shadow in the corner of their vision.

For the first few days they see little more than the highways.

Kris isn’t ever sure where they are, and with their phone long-dead and no means to charge it, it’s not like GPS can help, either. Mostly they track the signs: green markers with white text, proclaiming that they’re only three-hundred miles out from whatever big city is nearest. For all they know they’ve just been going around in circles. If Dess has a destination in mind they aren’t told it.

They aren’t told most things.

Dess can’t talk, and they don’t talk. The car is filled with silence, even when they pull over for the night, and Kris pokes around the backseat as they curl up to get comfortable, shivering into the night without the car left on to provide heat. A sweater and a jacket do little to stave off the cold, though the blankets they always wake up to help, a bit. They don’t think Dess sleeps much, though that was true of her Before, too. She sits in the driver’s seat and stares into the shadows of the highwayside woods, and sometimes Kris creeps up, settles alongside her, and watches empty nothing until their eyes droop shut.

They dream of Susie and Noelle and Ralsei and all the places they might go without Kris there to weigh them down. They dream of Dess, before, but her form is always distorted. The Dess of their dreams is a monster, but the Dess of their dreams is from a time where she was supposed to look like them. The two images can’t mesh together. So mostly they just see shadow and void.

Usually Dess is already driving again when they wake up. At least she’ll pull off for fast food.

Really, it’s not so different from the past six months of their life, except this time the scenery changes sometimes. But the room doesn’t. The same four walls, if these four walls are on wheels now, and barely larger than their bed. The seatbelt bites against their chest. They drag their nails down the window just to hear the scrape of them.

They aren’t sure why Dess bothered to leave, if all they were going to do was the same damned thing in a moving car.

But still. They sleep. They wake. Dess flips between radio channels and most of them come back distant and echoey. Dess swings wildly into the fast lane whenever they’re the only car around, and Kris’s heart leaps into their throat, dizzy. They do a very good corpse impression. Their legs are asleep more often than not. They always trip getting out of the car on their few pulled-over breaks. Dess catches their arm and against her they can feel their pulse throbbing in their cheek.

Dess’s phone rings, occasionally. It’s an old flipphone they’ve seen her throw out her window countless times, not that it ever seems to notice. She’s stuck a drawing of a deer to the front of it, a scribbly bit of art they think was done by her. Mostly Dess ignores it, and so they do, too. Try to make it part of the background noise.

Their head always jerks up at the sound. Like a second heartbeat. Like a distant shout of their name, and somehow, despite the distance, they keep twisting around to see who it might be.

One night Dess digs a notepad out of the glovebox, procures a pen from thin air—Kris has learned not to question the ways she casually defies reality—and writes I keep thinking it’s gonna be Asriel.

Kris says nothing at all, peering up at her. They can’t read her expressions on a good day—her face is blank mostly and one weird glowy eye doesn’t make for easily-translatable moods. But her static crackle-pops like electrical buildup, and her pen scritches against woodpulp paper. Kris’s gaze falls back to it, watches the jagged draw of Dess’s hands. Like there’s a faint buffer to everything she does. Or maybe that’s just the static afterimage. Either way it’s the first time they’ve communicated all week.

Stupid fucking thought to have, Dess continues. It’s only ever Mom. She’s the one who made me get a phone I couldn’t brick you know but that means the dumb thing is basically invincible no matter how many times I toss it into those weird pocket dimension thingies I’ve been messing with. I don’t know what Mom thinks is gonna come of this. I’m not picking up if it’s her. You’d think she’d catch the fucking hint by now.

Kris’s own phone sits heavy in their pocket. They keep watching.

Asriel says she’s doing this because she loves me. Dess pauses. Her handwriting is half-slant and mostly illegible, though Kris has gotten better at picking out the words no matter how blurred together they are. Would say. We don’t really talk anymore. He’s being stupid too.

Kris just nods. They haven’t been talking to their brother, either.

It’s like I have this piece of him stuck in my head or something. Like I know what he’d say and how he’d react except it sucks because he’s not even here for me to punch whenever he goes on about something dumb. And you know what the stupidest part is though? She shakes herself, huffs out a static grumbling. I think fake-Asriel is right. I think Mom does love me. I mean, shit! Look at you! She pokes their nose with her pen, and they already know what she hasn’t yet wrote: she would have doomed you to bring me back. Which yes, Kris would say, I would have doomed me, too. But Dess doesn’t write that.

Instead, she says, I hate her for that you know. Like I owe something to her. But I’m the one who brought me back like this. Mom would’ve brought back someone else. I mean, I don’t hate her. Not Mom, me. Me-her. Dess scribbles out a drawing of a round-faced person with short messy hair and stick antlers. She helpfully adds an arrow pointing from me-her to the drawing.

Kris watches it all without daring to breathe. It’s the first reference she’s made to Before in—in a long time, they think. That she used to be something other than this. That she used to be a human like—

I just wish Mom didn’t remember her so much, Dess continues, as Kris’s heart hammers in their throat, the soul twists sharp pains in their gut. She picked me out. She wanted a human kid and she picked me and. I mean. Her pen stabs through the paper. I guess if I it wasn’t for Mom and Dad I would’ve never figured out I WASN’T human, but. I don’t know. She circles it twice. I don’t know.

Kris says, “I thought you didn’t remember your life Before. Before—before. Before before.” There’s a lot of befores.

She laughs, a bit. A sort of fizzing hiss. I know what you mean. For a long moment she sits there with her pen bleeding ink onto the page. I dunno. Who does. Most days I… Her pen trails across the page. I don’t really remember much of either life. Before being adopted sure, but before this, and she pokes her chest with the pen, too. It’s just bits and flashes. Feelings. Like a dream you forget when you wake up.

There are a thousand things Kris could say, probably. If she doesn’t remember being Dess—doesn’t remember being their neighbor, their confidant, they only person they had ever met who was like them—why has she bothered to stick near them for so long? What compelled her to save them, when they were fine running their life right off the edge of a cliff? If she really, truly, didn’t remember before, then why would she never change back—

Kris bites their tongue hard enough to taste blood. Well. They can puzzle together the answer to that one, at least.

If they had been so lucky, they wouldn’t’ve changed back, either.

Instead, though, they say none of this, studying her words, then Dess herself. The sharp lines of her face. The way the darkness that makes her up undulates like the dark fountains used to, new and impossible and irrefutably there. When they were a kid, they used to ask her how she did it. How she claimed monster so easily, when anybody who looked at her would say otherwise.

Cause everyone else is a big dummy, is what she always said. I know what I am and nobody else gets to decide that for me.

Of course now that isn’t a problem for her.

Dess pokes her notebook into their face, and Kris blinks, recoiling. You okay? she’s written, on a fresh page, and under it, sorry we can’t talk much while driving. I think if I tried I’d run the car into a ditch. So I guess I’m game to try if you are.

Kris huffs, pushing the notebook away. Dess watches them with something like concern, maybe, if that’s what the downturned slant to her eye means. They shake her hand out of their hair, and only miss the pressure of it a little bit. Even now they still have to look up to see her. They have no idea what she’s getting from this. From them. She could’ve left and they’d have been none the wiser. It would’ve been better, probably. Without Dess around, there’d be nobody to keep them from being alone.

Their shapes don’t match anymore. Something curdles in Kris’s chest. It’s not that they’ve ever liked their body. It’s that once upon a time, at least they weren’t the only one with it.

“Are you ever gonna leave this car,” they say, hoarse, and Dess laughs, delighted static warbles.

Shut the fuck up, she writes, and slugs them in the shoulder. Let’s go break into a museum or something.

Kris laughs, too. It tastes strange in their mouth. But for a brief moment, as they tackle Dess right back, knocking her into the side of the car, it’s like everything is okay again: like they’re back in the days of the Before, Before, and the body they’re in doesn’t yet weigh them down.

So here’s how it goes.

They don’t break into a museum, and, really, Kris doesn’t leave the car much. Their world is the metal walls, the roar of tires on tarmac, the static-flash of Dess’s movements in the corners of their eyes. Mostly they don’t leave the highways, but as the days drag on there’s a restlessness to Dess, and while Kris might flinch away at the thought of setting foot onto sidewalk, Dess has no qualms parking the car somewhere. She always tells them where she’s going, messages ripped out and stuck to their chest. Kris reads them, sometimes. Tears them up other times. Stays in the car either way.

On the floor they manage to find the phone charger, wrap its coils around their fingers. While Dess returns with maps and attempts to figure out how to read them, Kris hunkers down in their seat and watches their phone as light returns to its cracked screen. Picks out shards of glass left in the broken spiderwebbing. Rolls them between the pads of their fingers, slip them underneath their nails.

Dess tears a map in two and throws it in the backseat. Kris watches the missed messages roll in.

She settles back into driving. Kris settles back into watching, blurry landscapes scrawling by.

They leave their phone in do-not-disturb, though they can’t stop themself from swiping down. Cataloging everything they’ve missed.

Dess doesn’t talk to them, and they don’t talk to her. The silence swallows them all. The days drag on.

And, as it always does, something cracks.

When Kris was a kid Dess was their favorite person in the world, and it wasn’t even a competition.

They don’t remember a life without her in it. She was over at their house every other day at least, picking them up, spinning them around, in old home videos, laughing at Asriel fretting over their fragility. They’re gonna be great, I just know it, she’d tell him, as little baby Kris giggled in her arms, reached up to poke at her nose. In their blurred baby-vision she must’ve looked majestic. Her antlers were bigger than Asriel’s horns, then, which were just starting to come in. They reached for them like the stars.

When compared to Asriel, their mother, their father, even Noelle—how could there have been any competition? They looked nothing like their family, but despite it all they looked like her, and she was a monster, which meant they were one, too.

But here, here, out in the world even if their slice of the world is mostly car, here Dess looks not a thing at all like them, and they don’t even like how they look, but there was something, before, wasn’t there? Some shared suffering, even if Dess never really got it like they did. The weight that smothered their words and crushed their hands and froze up their limbs was a thing they carried alone, but she saw it, at least. She straightened their horns and always said monster, even before they really knew it themself, when monster just was, and so why would they ever have to clarify it? She ruffled their hair and grinned at them, and they grinned back.

She said it when they were a kid and even as they got older, learned human was a word, human was what the body was, was what her body, was, an impossibility, because Dess was the best of them all, and so she was a monster, too. She collected their horns when they fell and stuck them back on their head, and in turn Kris did the same for her antlers, even if they tried chewing patterns in them, too. In the lowest pre-disappearance moments of their life she was there with them, said monster even when Kris was too shaky to think it for themselves. Through all those conversations they overheard between her and Asriel in those final months before she left them forever. They always were good about sneaking into places they weren’t supposed to be. Crept close to the ground.

They’re only like this because of you! Asriel would always snap. Damn it, Dess, how haven’t you grown out of this by now? You’re eighteen! You’re just—you’re setting a bad example for them!

Oh, I’m setting the bad example? There was a sharpness to her voice that was never present when around them. But still it made their heart warm, back then, that it was a sharpness not leveled at them, but in defense of them. Me, and not the guy who, oh, I don’t know, decided that the hill he wants to die on is that somehow me and them don’t know our own species? I’m not asking you to understand me, Asriel, because angel knows that ship’s long sailed. I’m asking you to fucking accept me.

You’re asking me to—to lie to them to make them, what, happier? I have to look out for them Dess, they’re my sibling, not yours! If it was Noelle— Asriel’s voice was near-wail. How are they supposed to—Dess, you aren’t, they, aren’t, if they try to go into the real world and they’re still so insistent that they’re a monster despite all evidence to the contrary—

Do you think, she’d said, that maybe, just maybe, if they’ve been saying they’re a monster since they could speak, that, hmm, I don’t know, they ARE?

Dess they’re still just a baby, Asriel said, and they thought he was crying. I, they don’t—they didn’t even know what humans were, they legitimately thought, still think you’re a monster, they think they’re a monster, they—

Wow, Dess said, sounds like the baby has a better grasp on things than you do, huh, and she’d stormed out, locked herself in her room, and she and Asriel didn’t talk so much after that.

Still, they’d creep into her room, sit with her there in the dark, where their shapes didn’t matter so much. Dess pet their head between their horns, and they wriggled into her affection, draped across her lap. She wasn’t so warm like Asriel was, like their parents were, like Noelle, but then again neither was Kris. Even as a kid they knew they were not good, but they were like Dess. And when she was around, it was easy to be a monster. She never let anybody tell her differently.

But then she left. Then she left them, and took all that surety with her, left Kris to mirrors and Asriel and well-meaning worries, to red horns shoved aside and forgotten, to a body that never looked like them, but what other body did they move through the world in? They never understood how she could walk by mirrors like they weren’t traps lying-in-wait, an eternal reminder that they would never be able to move through the world as they wanted to.

She left, and she died, and she’s gone. That Dess drowned herself in shadow, but unlike Kris’s attempts, actually got something out of it. Kris got a soul that shines too bright, with a jagged point piercing their gut. Kris got human, a flashing neon-sign, the first thing anybody would ever notice about them, no matter that all their family were monsters, that for the first ten years of their life they, too, were a monster, before human got its claws in them. That even with the body and the soul and everyone who said otherwise, they held monster like dead rot between their jaws.

Dess vanished. Dess spent a languid few years between nightmare and shadow, and she refused to let them die, and she came back with a monsterhood she never even struggled for.

Watching her, out there, through glass windows stained with their own fingerprints, Kris swallows, and swallows, and still the bile burns their throat. She passes through the world without a care. There is not a single part of her, anymore, that could be mistaken for human. Her antlers are a thing she grows, not something she must put on, and nobody could ever tear them off. Her static voice, the jagged flow of her hands as she writes her words across notebooks she pulls out aether-space. Inhuman and monstrous and beautiful, so, so beautiful, and Kris watches her and hates her for it, and still the bile bubbles up.

What did the dark ever give them? Blue skin. Metal armor. Even down there they never got to be themselves. Even down there they were only ever a human. The first hero, the cage, with human soul and parts! Laughing and taunting. It hung there between their ribcage, the soul, the heart, and it beat a flimsy life into the only veins they had ever known, and despite their best efforts, despite their aunt’s promise, they survived it all.

Kris’s hands flex, nails splitting against the leather seats. Weeks away from Hometown. What do they have to show for it? Thousands of ignored texts from friends who never really needed them anyways. Shadowstatic words that cloy to their mind. Dess, Dess, Dess. Her wrongright shape looming at their edges.

Everyone else got what they wanted. Noelle got it when they were still kids. Ralsei got it only in the aftermath of an ended world, sure, but HRT works for once-darkners the same it does for once-lighters: better, maybe, something about the squishy nature of a darkners’ body. See, Kris was listening! Susie shed her metaphorical scales and her literal ones. Patterned across in dappled shades of light and dark both. And Dess. Dess Holiday.

Kris’s hands fumble with the doorlatch and they tumble out into the grass.

Dess looks up and to them, a smile curling onto her strange blank face, lifts a hand to wave them over. She’s been trying and failing to start a campfire using a rock, a pointy stick, and various bits of goopy magic for the past hour or so. The sky above them has long gone dark and it is only the car’s headlights that cut through the night.

They can almost imagine the rise and fall of her voice. Hey, Kris, she might’ve said, once, back when they were still the same. Maybe she’d be making smores, halfway through burning her marshmallow to a charred crisp. They’d bundle up against her side, her draping her jacket around them, and it wouldn’t feel so wrong, needing to wear a jacket when Noelle and Asriel never had to, what with their thick winter fur-coats to keep them warm, because Dess did, which meant theirs was a good way to be a monster, too.

Now, of course, she has no voice at all, and they don’t remember what she sounded like, regardless. Static fritzes around her edges. She still has not managed to start a fire.

Kris approaches, and in the midnight silence their voice echoes oddly. They’ve pulled enough off the road that they can’t even hear the roar of the highway. “Why did you bring me with you?”

She rolls her eye, tossing stick and rock aside to drop down onto one of the larger logs. Today’s notepad is patterned with pawprints. Kris debates tearing it into shreds, but they just catch it when she tosses it to them, tilting it into the light. The ink of her words glint. Haven’t you asked me this before? I said. Until we figure out something better to do.

“Until you figure out something better to do,” Kris corrects, because they were perfectly fine wasting away in their room, thank you very much. If it wasn’t for Dess they would’ve, already. Their hands twitch, flex, tense up. Their nails bite into the thin flesh of their palm. They’re shivering, though that’s not new. “Why did you bother to bring me? All you’ve done before is leave me behind.”

She recoils as if struck, and Kris slinks over to drop down onto the log across from her, staring into the empty pit of grass where all her failed firestarting attempts lie, bits of shorn-off stick and chipped rock. They paw through them, roll a shard of flint or whatever it is between their fingers. It stains dark behind, and they drop it and their hand, rubbing it across their leg. Their heart is beating in their throat.

Kris… it’s not words, but they’ve come to recognize the static pattern of their name, a mournful sort of rise-and-fall. Dess stands, collects her notebook, comes to sit next to them. When they lean against her their teeth buzz with the magic of her, the void, and they shiver harder. The only jacket they’ve brought is the one she gave to them. Dess tugs it a little tighter around their shoulders, but soon retracts her hand to scribble something new down.

When she tilts her notepad enough into the headlight beam that they can read it, it simply says, can I show you something, Kris?

They sniff. “Can I stop you?”

She laughs, or they think she does, at least. Maybe she’s just choking. Somehow the shadows of her pulse warmth, and despite themself they can’t pull away. She always wanted to take them camping, Dess did. They best they ever managed was the woods behind their house, and Mom called, like, one thousand times. As if they were going to be eaten in the night.

Maybe she was more right to be worried than they knew.

When they look back to Dess, she’s tilting her pen this-way and that over the notepad, one eye furrowed in confusion, or concentration, or something along those lines. She’s not silent—Dess is never silent—but still her constant chatter is long gone. Static pops, crackles. A sort of undercurrent of a growl. Better than they’ve ever managed.

They grab one of her arms and rest against it, closing their eyes.

Not for long, though. Before they know it she’s poking them, grinning, a bit. Falling asleep on me? she’s written.

Kris paws at their eyes. “You don’t even sleep. You just sit up awake all the time. Kinda creepy.”

Too cool for it. She hesitates. I…the thing I want to show you.

They straighten up.

Don’t freak out, she continues, and give me a few more minutes. It would be easier if I could still talk. She’s still for a long moment, save for the ebb and flow of her shadowshape. Like a dark fountain. The darkness rises and falls. Maybe I should have you teach me more Sign one of these nights, might make it a bit better. I need to prewrite some more stuff. Don’t peek.

They don’t. They stare into the woods as she scratches away. They are not deep woods, but neither are they just here to be cut down, in a year or two. Deep enough to hide whatever might lie on the other side of the highway, stripmalls and gas stations and fast food. The branches wave in the wind, reds and yellows darkened by the night sky. If they tilt their head back they can even see the stars scrawled across an unfamiliar sky.

They’re further from home than they’ve ever been before.

They’ve drawn back into themself when Dess taps their shoulder, her notepad open to a page that just reads okay I’m ready. She’s added a smiley face. They aren’t really sure if it’s helping. But she flips to another one before they can decide.

Kris, she’s written, I know things have been bad. For you. Since—you know. A splotch of dark ink before the words continue. And I guess just kinda kidnapping you out of your bedroom or whatever is kinda a strange thing to do. But I wanted you to see it. That I, that we get to live. That we get to just EXIST as ourselves and that—I mean, you’re lucky you know? You know how many times I had to dodge my own sister coming to hang out with you? She’s a fucking bloodhound Kris, if she wasn’t so nice I think she woulda cut down your door. Also if your other friend found her magic axe. Kris laughs, a bit. Dess grins at them, and they shake it off and continue.

You ask me why I’m doing things like I’ve got some big grand plans and you’ve known me your entire life, Kris, you know I don’t work like that. I just do what’s right in the moment and in the moment I said fuck it. I tried staying here once before and it nearly killed me and I can’t do that again and you’re like me, Kris. That town was gonna kill us both no matter how much the world ends in between. So…

The page trails off into nothing. Kris flips to the next one.

I know a lot of stuff has changed. Like too many things to list here and my hand’s gonna cramp if I try. But we ARE still the same, okay Kris? I just want you to know that. You weren’t ever why I left. You’re the only person I ever considered bringing with me. Guess that’s why I’m doing it now. Kris swallows. Blinks away a wetness that drips onto the paper. Stupid. So stupid. They shiver into the night. Anyway all that’s the preamble stuff. Don’t flip to the next page until it’s time. You will for sure know when it’s time. Maybe give me the notepad though just in case.

Wordlessly, they inch the notepad back over to Dess. She looks at them, at it. And then she flips to the next page.

Don’t freak, it reads, in letters large enough to fill the entire page.

Kris almost asks—what do you mean? But before they can even begin forming the shape of the words, Dess stands up,

and plunges a hand right through her chest,

and teases out something glowing and bright and

heart-

shaped—

Kris trips backwards off the log, lands hard on their side, hands scrambling for traction, to push themself Up, and Away, away away away, and their heart is already rabbiting in their chest, leaping up into their throat, blocking off all air from reaching them. In their chest they can feel It squirming, the soul, the It, everything they’ve ever called it, an echo in their ears that drowns out all else. Will you do this for me, Aunt Carol had asked, I need a human to do this for me, and it was like she wasn’t even their aunt anymore. Like she’d never once seen them. And there was a weight in their chest, a chain around their throat. Foreign and impossible and it had been sitting between their ribcage for their entire life.

A soul hovers in front of Dess’s chest.

DON’T FREAK, she taps, again, though Kris can hardly read it through the shaking. They—can’t breathe. Which is fine really. That’s step one in being done with it all but still their lungs spasm for air, and their palms cut against stick and rock, and they bite down on their cheek until they taste blood, warm. The soul hovers there still no matter how many times they blink. It is—not. Entirely. The same as the one in their chest. It’s darker, for one, less of a vivid red and more a shadowed one, and like Dess’s shadowskin it undulates within its heart-shaped encasing. Cracks around the edges.

Kris, Dess says, in that static shriek of hers, KRIS, and their gaze snaps to her, recoiled as they are, limbs heaving. Phantoms they haven’t felt in years are solid as their own beating heart. Ears pressed flat. Tail tucked low. Dess’s dark edges are lit red by the thing in hovering just above her hand. A perfectly shaped heart.

With her other hand she tosses the notepad back to them. New page.

Bet you know what this is, it starts. The words all blur and merge together. When they look back to Dess the soul has changed. It’s—hovering. Still. Red-tinged-black. But no longer does that pointed tip face towards the ground. Instead she’s flipped it around.

Everyone’s always told me this is what a human soul looks like. The words don’t make sense. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t! Kris tastes blood coppersharp. Their nails are digging into the dirt. Which is stupid as shit honestly. Like what’s the difference between monster and human souls? Oh? Oh it’s that one of them is facing one way and the other the other way? Come on. It’s like these people don’t know that you can rotate 3D objects.

Kris, this is what I need you to know okay? This is my soul. I’m a monster. That means the soul I have is a monster’s soul. Sure the world is going to be stupid as hell about it, I’m not saying it won’t. I LIVED it being stupid. But that doesn’t change who you are. Don’t ever let it change who you are. We’re the same sort of monster. We’ve gotta stick it out together.

Such stupid, stupid words.

In front of them is Dess. Perfect, monstrous Dess. Not a single part of her could ever, ever, be mistaken for a human, except maybe the soul, so conveniently tucked away and hidden where nobody ever will see it. Dess Holiday, everyone! A monster.

And Kris. Kris, with their human face and human hands and human legs and human soul and human body—

“No!” They smack the notepad, watch it skid across the ground. “No, no, no! No—” and their voice catches, flinching back from Dess when she tries to reach for them, again when the soul sinks back into her chest, because, “no,” and they spin around, snarl up at her, “you aren’t anything like me!”

Something cracks. Something is always cracking, really, but they realize, belated, that it is the log they were sitting on, splintering underneath them, and they yelp at the sharp stab of a splinter into their palm, keep backing away from Dess despite it.

“How dare you—” Their blood smears across the dirt. “Of course my soul isn’t a monster’s soul! Of course yours is! We aren’t the same anymore! We aren’t the same anymore!”

Yes we are! Dess drags her words across a fallen bit of paper, the pen stabbing through it. Kris staggers, heaving, against a tree-trunk, the roots scraping up their hands. Someone’s gotta look out for you and it sure as shit wasn’t ever gonna be Asriel, and she’s still writing, they can tell, but that’s a step too far, and they lunge to wrestle the pen out of her grip, grabbing it until it splits between their teeth. Pen-ink coats their tongue, mixes with the blood. They stumble back to the ground panting. Dess’s words are torn pages between them both.

“And you did? You left me! You left me! You left me and you took it all, you, without you, I couldn’t,” they sob, burying their head in their hands, hunching over. Dess’s static flickers and falls beside them, like she can’t decide if she should come closer or not. “You never even cared,” and their voice cracks. “You, you just were. You just were a monster, but I never was! I never got that!” Their nails catch and tangle in their hair. “You never hated it but I do, I hate it, I hate this body I hate this soul and I’ll never get to be myself and you never cared and you’re the one who got to change—”

A hand on their shoulder. Sad warbling shadowstatic in the rise and fall of their name.

“Don’t touch me!” Kris jerks away, shivering, and Dess’s hand was so warm, her stupid monstrous hand. “I hate you. I hate you so much. Why did it happen to you? Why you? Why…why not me?”

Were they not good enough? And, ha, they rub at their eyes, sniffling into the dirt. Of course they weren’t good enough. Weren’t ever going to be good enough. Nothing more than the pathetic human child of the family. Dess got out. Dess got to leave. But Kris? Kris, Kris, Kris. A lifetime of growing up with her. Only one of them was ever going to be a monster.

“Why did you save me?” When they look back up at Dess they think she might be crying, too, which they didn’t even know was possible. “If I have to be like this for the rest of my life, what—what was the point of it all—”

They sway, collapse again.

They aren’t too sure what happens next.

When Kris wakes up they’re back in the car with Dess’s old jacket draped over them, as well as all three of the blankets Dess brought. Someone’s cleaned their hands, or, best as is possible to clean their hands when they’re in the middle of nowhere. Most of the dirt and crusted blood is gone. They no longer have any splinters.

A single page from Dess’s battered notepad has been left on the seat. Kris unfolds it.

If I could give you my transition, Dess has written out, I would’ve, Kris.

They’re still crying, they think. Maybe they never stopped. Their chest is an empty pit. Still, though, they paw open the glovebox, fumble for a pen.

No you wouldn’t, they write. Their hand shaking the entire time. You wouldn’t even let me die.

They roll down the window just enough to slip the page back out, catch sight of Dess, sat there at their failed campsite. They can’t see her soul. She’s not facing them. But they can see the red glow of it spilling out around her edges.

When they drag their own soul out it’s a red so bright it would blind out the sun. Nothing like the muddled colors of Dess’s.

A human soul for a human body, Kris thinks, shuddering. The jacket isn’t enough. Neither are the three blankets. They want Dess, and they sink down, wrap themself around the soul, sob into it. They want the Dess they remember. They want the Dess who looked like them and thus was a monster like them. They want the Dess who never did anything wrong. They want Dess before she got everything they will never have.

In their arms the soul beats a steady human rhythm. It tastes like ash no matter how many times they bite it.

Kris is in a motel.

They are not sure how they got into said motel, though they can make a few educated guesses. They have not spoken to Dess since their—fight—and mostly, in the car, they stared out the window until the scenery blurred to color and shape and nothing that fit together so well. Somewhere between that haze Dess must’ve actually shelled out for a room.

Not a big room. It is barely big enough to fit the two beds, smaller than Kris’s room back home. They are huddled into one of the beds, still wearing Dess’s old jacket. Their hands are smeared red with soulblood, though whenever they blink it keeps fading away. They aren’t sure if the blood is reality or the motel is.

The walls are peeling wallpaper and mysterious stains. The carpet is mildewy. There is a single grimy window through which they can see the car parked out front.

There is a shadow outside of the room.

They can see her through the window, sepia-toned, her pure darkness a sort of hazy off-black. She’s using the front of the car as a brace, scribbling down words Kris can only guess at, before ripping the page out of her notepad and hucking it towards the garbage can nearby. It misses, and rolls into a pile of similar torn paper. 

The notepad is almost out of pages. It is in no pattern Kris can recognize.

There isn’t anything else to watch, here, but still they pull their gaze away, drop down sideways onto the bed and curl into themself. If they focus—really focus, strain their ears, ignore the phantoms straining with them—they can almost hear the buzz of Dess’s staticvoice, like some undercurrent grumbling.

They slip into something approaching sleep.

When they open their eyes they are no longer alone in the room. Dess is sat at the foot of the other bed, staring blankly at the wall, occasionally doodling on the notepad she’s left at her side. Nothing distinct. Mostly just lines and scratches.

Kris clears their throat and Dess jerks to look at them.

She looks—well, mostly she looks like she always has. Same shadow face. Same single glowing eye. But it’s downturned, and the edges of her form are still, frozen in place, rather than shifting about in some ever-flowing motion. She’s stayed. She’s come back. She’s entirely unlike how she used to be, and she didn’t leave them behind, this time. And she’s a monster, and they’re…

“…why?” Kris croaks.

Dess shrugs. Flips back in the notepad, covering up the doodles, to a page with words. This she holds out for Kris, and they creep to the edge of their bed, take it from her.

On it she has written, I was going to take you to Yellowstone.

Kris blinks. Stares at her, back to the page, the words already forming, but before they can again ask why, she motions for them to turn the page. They do.

I knew I had to get out of town. It was destroying me and Mom was no help and everyone was just—smothering. Even Elly got in her head about it. Like I had to be treated with kid gloves or like I don’t know, like there were two mes. Like the me before it all and the me after it all and maybe the me during it all and I don’t know. It all just, I mean it doesn’t feel chronological. But it’s not like it feels like that was all someone else. It’s just…me. It’s just me.

Anyways, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And it broke my heart to see you like that too. Like you just wanted to give up. Waste away. I mean I knew some of it from Noelle, your friends have been spending a lot of time in her room. And I saw it all myself. I thought maybe hanging out would fix it. I mean it used to. But you just kept lying there. And I thought well. I knew you loved wolves and coyotes and all that stuff, and I remember you used to watch those documentaries about wolves in Yellowstone and I mean I had the license I could get Mom’s car before she noticed, and…

I thought it would be fun. Get out of Hometown. Go somewhere nobody knows us. And maybe you’d see something you like and stop wanting to die so much. They can almost see where she stopped, hesitated. Continued on despite that. I don’t know. It’s stupid when I lay it all out. I guess I knew it was stupid even when I had the idea. It’s not like leaving ever worked for me. But I don’t know what else to do.

“You.” Kris scrubs at their eyes. She’s right. It is stupid. They aren’t even anywhere near Yellowstone, Kris is pretty sure. They’re not entirely convinced they’ve even left the South. “You remembered all that? That I liked…”

They trail off as she takes her notepad back from them, the room silent other than the scritch-scratch of pen against paper, the general warble of her voice. They can’t make out the meaning of it, of course, though the various different sounds are familiar to them. Kris watches her across the gap between the beds, twisting their hand into the sheets.

They really thought she just—

What, didn’t remember them? Of course she remembered them, it’s just…

“I thought it was surface-level,” they blurt out, and Dess pauses in her writing, and Kris trips over the next words but keeps going. “That you—I mean, all the stuff we—when we were the same, and—but you aren’t. Not anymore. You…you aren’t.”

Her warbling gains a distinct sorrowful tone, and she resumes her writing with much more speed. Messier, this time. Kris reads.

Of course I remember the stuff you liked idiot you were one of like three people I really truly cared about without having to worry. I thought that was obvious. I didn’t want you to die to bring me back. A few start-and-stop sentences, all scribbled out. I know we don’t really look all to similar anymore. But I didn’t…

I’ve always been a monster Kris. Just because I look different now doesn’t mean I forgot all the life I lived before.

“You just.” Kris sniffs. Their voice is hoarse, still, though if that’s from the fight or just the fact that they haven’t used it all too often in the past six months, who knows. Despite everything they’ve never struggled with their words around Dess. Different as she might look. “…it’s just not fair you always get to be a monster. And I never do.”

Dess is writing before they’ve even finished. But you ARE a monster Kris just because your body—

They reach across the gap and snatch the pen before she can finish what they already know she’s going to say. Dess grumbles at them—a sort of high-pitched, annoyed burst of static—but otherwise doesn’t try to take the pen back.

“It’s—I’m not like you.” Kris’s gaze falls down to their hands, braced against the edge of the bed. One wrong step and they’ll tumble right off. “Even…even before, it’s…I’m not dumb. I know I’m really a human. I know I can say whatever I want and I know that you always say well you know better or whatever dumb thing it is, but…” Kris drags a nail down the sheets. “It’s never actually going to be real. Nobody else can see my body as anything but human, but I can’t see it, either. The mirror still shows one thing. My body still moves through the world as one thing. Sometimes, I…” The trail off, their voice vanishing into near-silence. “…sometimes I don’t think I ever was a monster at all.”

When Dess takes her pen back they don’t protest, just curl up right there, close enough to falling off. Her hand lingers on their back for a moment before pulling away, and Kris only misses it a little bit. It’s so stupid, really. Some scrawny human kid, and all their problems are because—what? They never got the memo about their species? The one most obvious thing you can’t change?

Well. That they can’t change.

“I guess you just had this confidence,” they mumble into their arms, “that you could be this thing that always felt so out of reach. And I wanted to believe like you. But. I don’t know. You did a lot of the believing for me. And then you left. And it’s…I can feel the want. But it’s smothered by souls and ribcages and all this other stuff. I won’t ever get there.”

It was a really nice thought to entertain, being a monster. But it was only ever that: a thought.

Paper crumbles against their nose, and Kris scrunches up their face. Dess prods harder.

If you aren’t a human, she’s written, don’t keep trying to be one. Even if you can’t be a monster.

“What else even is there?” Kris’s voice cracks, though they tuck the paper up underneath them, crumpling against their chin. “I just…why, Dess? You said you wanted to let me see wolves and coyotes and—but what’s the point? If this is all there is. If I can’t ever make my body right. You got to transition, you—” But they swallow down the rage. It’s not that hot, anyways. Just a few spluttering embers. Mostly, they just want to close their eyes. “If this is all there is, why even bother to keep going?”

She passes them a new page, where her words are writ so darkly Kris can feel the ink wet against their fingertips. You think I know the answer any more than you do?

For a second the rage is back again, blistering and all, because you came back, because you left, because you got everything I ever wanted—

Dess is watching them. Her single eye narrowed. She’s hunched over, too. Torn-up notepad braced on her thigh. There’s…a lot of discarded pages littering the floor, and that says nothing of the ones they saw outside. They…hadn’t even noticed. Hadn’t even noticed that, for all they agreed to come with her on this trip, that she…

Kris smears a hand across their face, sitting up halfway, with their hands still braced on the bed, but at least they aren’t in a heap anymore. “…but you came back.”

Yes, says Dess’s next page, because that was entirely my choice and not because Mom couldn’t just let me fucking rest in peace. She’s still for a moment, leaving Kris to turn her words over, literally, too, twisting up the page they were torn out on. The edges cut across their skin, a double-sight of lines. Sometimes, if they look really closely at their own skin, they can almost see it in patches of scales, like Susie. Or the fuzzy hairs that poke through, a half-grown fur coat.

They say, “I wanted you back too.”

There’s no way you do it without Mom. I came back because in that moment it was either that or you die. And I wasn’t going to let you die. Dess’s pen stills. Kris look. I was always going to leave okay? Maybe not in that exact way but it wasn’t a freak accident. It was always just a matter of time. Back then, now, it’s all the same. You think I want to get a 9 to 5? You think I’d survive in one? I’m a monster I KNOW I’m a monster but whether I look like this or that, I was always gonna stand out.

It’s not even that I wanted to look like this. It’s that everything tried to kill me so I turned around and MADE it me, and I mean I like it now. But I liked me back then too. I’m always just ME. It’s all I ever get. So I might as well put in the effort to make my body a home worth living in, but…

I don’t know. I don’t know, Kris. Even as they finish she’s already started work on the next page. A sort of staggered way to have a conversation. They never knew…

“Dess,” they say. She pauses, glances to them. “Why didn’t you ever…you could’ve told me. And then when I…” Because if they’d known she struggled like they did, that maybe it wasn’t so naturally easier for her, then—

Well. They don’t think they would’ve ever started liking their body. But maybe it would’ve been nicer.

You were a kid, Kris. Wasn’t about to saddle it all on you. I just wanted you to think that maybe if I made it you could make it too. Kinda stupid I know. Proven I’m not very good at ‘making it.’ She huffs, shakes herself, returns to her original page. This time when Kris moves, it is to slink across the gap between them, settle there at her side. Dess tenses though not for long, the ichor of her shadowskin pressed against them, her arm not writing resting across their back.

Her next page just has a single sentence on it. You know I’ve been considering offing myself for real too?

Kris—recoils, blinks. Dess is cold against them, and her elbow pointy against their spine, though they grip for her arm and huddle there with it underneath them. Above offing myself she’s drawn a little doodle of herself, shadow-monster self, with a single x where her eye is, and it’s so morbid Kris can’t bite back the giggle that escapes them, and across from them Dess grins, snatching the page back to add on something more.

It’s nice to know I was real good at hiding that from you and Elly before all this, she says. Though I guess before all this it wasn’t that I wanted to die really, I just wanted something else. And I knew it was out there and I had to get out or I’d die here and I couldn’t die here I couldn’t I COULD’T, I could not. A few scribbles before the words continue. Now it’s worse though. Mom wants me to do one thing. Elly another. Dad isn’t even—I never even got to say goodbye to him. I didn’t even know I would have to, that he was…

Kris nudges a bit closer to Dess, and her smile down at them is sad.

All I knew was that if I was gonna die, cause I figured I was gonna die no matter what, I had to make sure nobody could twist things when I did. That they were gonna know me as Dess Holiday the monster, not anything else.

Kris bunts their head to her side. “I think you’re a really good monster.”

Her smiles tilts somewhere closer to happy. You’re a pretty good one too.

“Maybe.” They don’t feel it any more than they did yesterday, during their fight, six months ago. Really, it feels exactly the same as it did years and years and years ago, when they realized their body was not the body of a monsters’, and thus they’d never be comfortable in it again. Still the soul beats in their chest, and they know, were they to tug it out, that it would change nothing at all, that it would only ever be a human soul, a defining mark on their character impossible to wipe away. Still their hands, their face, their body, is not the one they want to live in. Still they sit next to Dess, and they hate her, a little bit, for leaving them, for coming back, for bringing them here.

And yet.

All her pages gathered around them, so many things she’s never told them before. It’s an impossible thought, that she could sit next to them, and want to die, too. That maybe back when they were a kid she wanted it, and hated the body she lived in, even if it wasn’t so much as they did. That she was like them, impossibly. That maybe they are still, a little bit, alike.

They tilt their head back and say, “I don’t really hate you. I don’t think I can.”

Dess pets their head with one hand, writes with another, it’s okay if you do.

Kris shrugs.

I mean it, she adds, and they just shrug again. …I can bring you home if you want.

“Maybe,” Kris says.

It’s just I know you have people back there. Her hand falters. You’re really lucky Kris. It’s really obvious that your friends care so much about you. I have never seen another trio happier to sit outside your door being ignored day-in and day-out, and not one of them have faltered.

They put a hand to hers before she can write right off the page and stab herself accidentally with the pen. “…they have each other.”

But they want you there too. Just don’t take that for granted okay? I know you’ve put your phone on do not disturb but even that isn’t enough. I know they’re still texting you.

Kris is quiet.

You know Asriel used to be cool about me? Dess huffs out a laugh. When we were little, like seven eight nine, it wasn’t even a fight. He’s the first person I told about being a monster and he just accepted it, right there. He was a brat as a kid really, he’d get into fights with everyone else about it. I wasn’t like you when I was your age. I mean I was old enough that…

She scratches out the end of the sentence, continues. I knew from the start that my body was a human body. I grew up with humans and all until Mom and Dad came around. But it’s like I never knew I could be anything else until I was with them. And all these little things that I never understood started to add up, and then I just knew. I knew why my skin never fit right and Asriel was right there at my side for all of it. I don’t think he ever really understood, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to. And then…

He said it was because he was scared for me. That he didn’t want me to be hurt. That I had to grow up because we weren’t kids anymore, I couldn’t pretend like that anymore, that it wasn’t NORMAL, what I was doing. He said he knew it was terrible but I couldn’t change my body. That the world wouldn’t let me that it would hate me forever that it was going to tear me apart, and he needed me to stop.

I could take the world hating me. I just didn’t know what to do when it was my best friend.

She rubs at her eye. It’s not that she’s crying, Kris thinks. But she sighs, an echo of static.

I guess what I’m getting at is that your friends are different, she writes, and they’re going to be there for you, I know it. And so just say the word. You don’t have to wander around the world aimlessly like I’ll be doing. You have people who want you to stick around.

And—maybe. Maybe. They never asked to be here, and of course they miss their friends. The easy way Susie would drag them to her side, ruffling their hair, or Ralsei’s gentle petting, like they were something worth taking care of, or Noelle, Noelle, the pair of them orbiting each other and never sure what to do about all those old memories hanging between them—until she took the first plunge, and crossed over to their side. Their heart aches. Their soul beats. They haven’t heard their friends’ voices for months.

They never asked for any of this, really. The one thing they asked for—to save Dess, to be gone with it—was denied to them, by the very monster they brought back. And now she sits alongside them, and Kris leans into her side, presses their head up to her chest, to hear the beat of her soul. A reddish-black. Pointed end down, like theirs. Though she can rotate hers. Maybe that makes her more a monster than they were ever able to imagine.

“Do you miss it?” they ask. “Being—something else.” The knight. A monster. Dess.

I really do think I was only ever just me, Dess writes, but yeah sometimes. It’s like…it’s like I never know what was the dream, and what was real. But it was all real. Growing up. Changing. I blinked and you and Elly were nearly adults, and Asriel’s a real adult, and I just stood there. I look different on the outside but really I don’t think I changed much at all. I’m Dess. I’m a monster. I’m here even if I don’t know why. And I guess I have to figure out how to be okay with that.

“Heh heh.” Kris closes their eyes, leaned up against her. “Now you’re like my age.”

Dess flicks them in the head, and they open their eyes to grin up at her, dodge her next swat, and roll over onto her lap as she uses their chest to write out her response. Okay don’t go THAT far you little twerp there is no power in the universe that is making me do 16 again.

…18, though.

“Eighteen,” Kris echoes. It makes no sense, really. That one day Dess could be eight years their senior, and the next, barely more than two. And yet.

And yet.

Bzzt bzzt bzzt. Their phone sits before them on the bed, as it has for the past hour, since Kris woke up, dug it out of their pocket, and turned off do not disturb. They’re currently alone in the room—Dess went out to figure out breakfast about ten minutes ago, leaving them with a ruffle of their hair and a either text your friends back or let me escape all the buzzing, which, okay, fair. Still though.

Bzzt bzzt bzzt. Like a heartbeat. Like a soul that pulses in-time. The screen isn’t so shattered, really. Just the bit of plastic laid over it, to keep the screen underneath safe. That loves to cut up their fingers, but they’re already on the road. Maybe they’ll pass by a store and get another one. It’s—hard to imagine. Them as they are setting foot into a store, surrounded by humans and monsters they have never met, that have never met them.

They like the idea of Dess by their side. The demanding snarl of her shadows, a dare for anybody to try and start something. It’s obvious that she wants to actually go places. This entire trip was her idea, after all. They aren’t sure they could follow her into such an enclosed space. Aren’t sure they’re really brave enough for that. To take the stares and the interactions. At least the people in Hometown who didn’t know what they were supposed to be knew they were something other. But out here…

Bzzt bzzt bzzt. It’s impressive, really. How long has Kris been gone? Time slips between their fingers. But two weeks, at least. Six months before that. Years and years and years, for Noelle. But not a one of their friends has given up.

The buzzing is broken by the creaking of the door, and then the slam of it hitting the wall, as Dess comes barreling back into the room, her arms full of various vending-machine snacks, which she dumps onto the bed next to Kris and throws herself down after, only accidentally crushing one bag of cookies.

Hope you really love chips, she’s written on a sticky-note pressed to one such bag. Or stale granola bars and crushed cookies. She glances them over, their phone screen lit up with texts, and adds, smushed into the corner of the note, you gonna sit here forever or.

“Sitting here forever sounds alright,” Kris says. They settle down at her side, tear into one of the chip-bags. Barbeque. Not the saddest breakfast they’ve ever had. “Are you just gonna watch me the entire time.”

I’m emotionally invested in your life but I’ll fuck off outside if you so deeply need privacy, she writes, standing after she’s stuck the note to Kris’s nose. They fumble for it and she laughs, a rumbling bit of static. I’ll be at the car when you’re done. Just maybe figure it out in the next two hours ‘cause that’s when we have to check out and I do have mom’s card but I’m hoping the less money I spend the less she’ll feel the need to cut me off.

Kris laughs, a breathing-out. “Okay.”

They pick up their phone and open their texts.

After, Kris tucks their phone back into the pocket of Dess’s old jacket, settled around their shoulders. Gathers up their various food trash, glances around the room, though they’re the only thing left here that they would like to bring with them someplace else. And so out they go, where they hop up to sit next to Dess on the front of the car, their feet kicking into the grille.

“I think I figured out what I wanna do next,” they say, and Dess looks to them, waiting. “I…”

It’s not that they don’t miss their friends, because of course they do. Texting was good but it wasn’t enough, and how could they have ever tuned their friends out into nothing but background noise? When they reach for their voices their mind comes up with warmth and softness and blank. Yet, yet, yet. Hometown is a sharpness across their tongue, like the sudden tang of blood, and despite their friends being there they cannot imagine going back. Not now. Not yet.

But neither can they imagine elsewhere, either, imagine what their life is supposed to look like. It hangs around them: body, soul, the empty scrawl of the same landscape, repeating over and over again, aimless and transitory. It would, and they lean their head against Dess, their hair fritzing up with her static, the steady pulse of her shadow, be easier to just—be done with it all. They cannot imagine living much past sixteen, not in this body, not in this way. And there is not a thing they can do to change it.

But didn’t they once never imagine themself even getting to this point? Sixteen years old. Living to see Dess’s return, and the both of them somewhere else.

Kris tilts their head back, nudged against Dess’s shoulder. “Did I ever tell you about my favorite Yellowstone wolf?”

Dess hums, curious.

“She’s—she was the leader of one of the packs there. They had a documentary about her, around when…you know.” Kris glances down. “…you know. It didn’t really help. But it was—something. I used to think maybe I could be good like that. I mean she was good at being a wolf. Making sure her pups lived, hunting elk and bison and stuff. She’s able to do it all by herself. But it’s easier with the rest of her pack. And then—one of her packmates gets shot. Killed. Someone who’d been with her since the start, and she goes back to the last place she saw him. And she’s killed too.”

Dess had already been gone by then, so it wasn’t like it was Kris’s first experience with death. But it was—something, something. How was a wolf supposed to understand hunting seasons? He was there, and then he was gone, and she’d gone to find him and there was nothing and nobody and she died never understanding just what it was that ended her. Against them Dess warbles, sad, and Kris grips her arm a bit tighter. Somewhere swallowed by the dark and the deep. What were they supposed to do? Keep stepping into a danger they did not understand. Just that maybe they’d never come back.

“She was a wolf. And for that she died, and she was shot, because—because she went somewhere she wasn’t wanted. But she didn’t know. None of them knew! It’s just—land. It’s just space, and—and it was the last place she saw someone she…she really cared about. How was she supposed to know someone had drawn a boundary there? That she’d crossed somewhere she couldn’t come back from?”

They rub at their eyes, take a breath. It’s a story that’s over a decade old at this point. And it’s not like they knew her, and even if they’d seen her, she wouldn’t have known them. They would have been recognized as nothing but a potential threat. And really, they don’t think they’re good enough to be a wolf. Their limbs could never match those shapes.

“The world wasn’t made for her,” and Kris’s voice cracks. “I don’t think it was made for—for either of us.”

The words hang there between them. All surrounded by death.

“I’m not a monster,” Kris says. Their chest aches. The soul beats. When they press a hand to it they can feel their ribcage, the thrumming of the soul that has not let them die, that means they can only ever exist here, within these human-flesh walls. Dess studies them, her sounds somewhere between concern and wanting, and they continue, “but I’m not a human either.”

She taps a hand to their knee. Okay.

“I don’t know what I am.” Kris laughs, flops sideways across her lap, paws up to the sky above them. Brighter than anything they’ve ever seen, and Dess fixes her arms around them before they roll right off the edge of the car. “But I do know that I…I want to keep going. Here. Now. I want to go. Go to Yellowstone, to, I don’t know. I want to see wolves, and coyotes, even if maybe one day they won’t get to be there anymore. I want to—to say that I saw it. That we were there, that it mattered, that they mattered. That—that no matter what the world says otherwise, and all the spaces it tries to build to keep them out, that…that I tried to do something else despite that.”

They take a breath. “I don’t know if I want to—make it. Forever.” They rest their hands on Dess’s arm, their head atop those. “But I want to make it now.”

Dess sets her notepad against their side to write out her response. Proud of you, kid. You making it makes me wanna stick around, too.

“That tickles!” Kris complains, swatting at her, and Dess just pokes them with the blunt end of her pen, until Kris grabs it between their jaws and wrestles it out of her grip. She pulls another one out of thin air and they wail, swaying dramatically against her.

Dess grins down at them. Friends?

“I’ve…never really been your friend before.” Kris thuds back down onto the car, traces a nail down its metal, reflecting the sun. “You were just—I don’t know. My sister? You were more than I could ever be. I didn’t know how to be good like you. But then you left me, and you’re back, and…I don’t know.”

Lucky for you, Dess writes, I’ve got no idea how to be your friend either. Means we’re in the same boat now. Took forever, but. She shrugs, hops off the car and holds out a final note. Want to figure it out together?

Kris grins. Really grins, leaping out after her, catching themself on her hand. How many miles to Yellowstone? They’ll be sure to see some weird things on the way, Kris knows. Maybe they’ll figure out some way to show the rest of their friends, hold up their phone to the window, or curl up next to it whenever they pull over to sleep, just to listen to their voices. Maybe they’ll finally help Dess figure out sign language. And of course they’ll have to go raid a store for more notepads. It would be mean not to.

“I do,” Kris tells her. Not human, not monster, some secret third thing. They’re still holding her hand, her hand of shadow-ichor. And it hurts, still, alongside their heart, that she will get this thing they never will, that what they want is an impossibility.

But—here. Here and here and here.

“Do you even know how to get to Yellowstone?” Kris scrambles past Dess to tumble into the car.

You shut up, they can almost hear in the offended shriek of her static, the playful lilt of her sounds. Like you know any better?

Together, they bicker over the keys, try and fail to get the GPS to work when Dess’s existence seems to throw it on the fritz, and are awful at figuring out the paper maps. They fight over the music until realizing no matter what is on they’re stuck to the whims of radio stations, and then spend the next few hours questing for aux cords and CDs and really just waste most of them. It’s loud and messy and throughout it all Kris feels alive, somehow, like the thrum of Dess’s shadows thrums for them, too, like maybe this time if they tugged out their soul, they might get halfway to rotating it around. Never perfect, but—okay enough.

Strange thing, isn’t it? They want to stick around long enough to see what happens next.