Work Text:
Yes, this was right.
The water was pleasantly warm—uncannily so, in fact, for autumn, but she would not think of that now—and the breeze stirred them into little hillocks, guided them with a tender hand towards her. The waves burbled and lapped at her ankles, enfolding her into their midst as if to welcome her. They hooked the arterial-red sunlight until weakness returned them to the lake.
Kris’s hands were cold. An impenetrable black shroud obscured their face. She knew what they were thinking, though.
“The water’s… nice, isn’t it, Kris?”
Kris dropped their head. Despite the wind, their hair was limp. Their fingers quivered like they meant to compensate for this oddity.
“Stop.”
Their voice was scarce a murmur. It was swept off to the far shore of the lake by the receding waves.
Noelle wanted to laugh. Now, after everything…
“Why… are your hands trembling…?” She laced their fingers, and their sweat clung to her fur. “Kris, you’re the one that wanted this, aren’t you?”
It was a lie, of course. She knew it the moment the words fell from her lips, and some deeper, undefined part of her had always known that…
I wanted this, too.
When Dess left, the world, sensing her absence, was plunged into disorder; somewhere in that tempest she had been thrown outside herself. It was as though she wandered aimlessly through a gallery, gazing at mere scraps of her life from her periphery. Occasionally some tattered ends would peer out from beneath the frames. Each time, she endeavored with everything in her to grasp at those scarlet threads, to gather them and weave them into a pattern… but it was to no avail. It was fruitless, all of it.
But the shards of the looking-glass through which she viewed herself had coalesced into a complete lens yesterday, when Kris put that ring back on.
She stepped farther back. The water was up to her knees. It soaked through her fur and skin, striving for her bones, but it could not quite reach her. She was whole yet.
“Stop.”
Was it terror writ upon Kris’s face? Surely the glass was smudged, or the shadows shuddered to give them the effect of such an expression.
“Stop pretending you’re still the old Kris.” A smile warped the line of her mouth. “You can’t even say stop like you used to.”
They were past the scattered leaves now. The hem of her skirt was sodden, dyed darker than black.
“Stop.” They spoke more firmly this time. Still, it was unchanged: projected from everywhere outside of them, from behind the papery leaves with their desiccated veins and their otherworldly chattering.
The real Kris wanted this.
“Proceed.”
Noelle had grown stronger. Kris didn’t need to speak it for her. She would read what pulsed in their heart and project it.
She laughed. “It’s… colder than I thought.”
Kris was stiff as if carved out of stone, seemingly unmoved by the water encroaching up to their middle. She allowed them to remain like that for a time. The dying sunlight flamed the very edges of their form and brought them to wobble, rendering them quite suddenly indistinct as a hastily-drawn silhouette. She clutched their hands like they were a lifeline, like if she relaxed her hold for even a moment the lines of her friend would unspool and slip through her fingers, and dragged them farther still.
“Proceed.”
There it was. No longer did the image of Kris waver before her. Relief inundated her heart.
“Kris, don’t let go of my hands.” She glanced at them through her eyelashes. “Just keep walking.”
“Proceed.” It sounded as if the word had been wrung out of them. The true Kris rattled the bars of their inhibitions.
Their motions were sluggish, their limbs soaked lengths of rope. The water kissed their shoulders. Noelle was faintly aware of how her hair billowed in the waves, following the listless swaying of the leaves sheeting the water nearer the shore.
“Kris, just… keep walking.”
“Proceed.”
The word worked as a spell upon her, but she was strong in her own right—of course she was. She had returned Kris to themself, and now they were here together, marching steadily towards some unknowable future.
“Kris…”
“Proceed.”
Their voice rang in her ears and rattled about her skull. The lens was besmirched further, in all likelihood because the water was at her chin; through the sullied glass, she could just make out the determined draw of Kris’s lips, the shadow-teeming wells where their eyes had been. They would take this to the absolute.
“Proceed.”
“Proceed.”
“Proceed.”
The lake-water, once so benign, set its teeth into her. Her heart beat in wild throes out of her chest. Her lungs spasmed and contorted, straining against her rib cage as they struggled to draw air, threatening to tear at their fleshy seams. It was but an instinctual reaction of the body. She had suppressed a similar revulsion before: to haul that spell from the unknowable depths of her power, to relent as Kris gripped her wrist and forced the ring onto her finger. It had hurt then, too, but she had grown stronger.
She could hardly parse Kris’s voice from the underwater clamor. She didn’t need to. The word had been stamped on her consciousness.
Proceed.
Her hold of it must have loosened at some point. The looking-glass clattered to the ground. Its fragments skittered away from her, scintillated in the light that came from nowhere.
Nothing changed.
She was back in that gallery, staring into the frames in a mad search for meaning.
Nothing changed.
The sunset had faded to a red belt on the horizon. Susie was cradling her in her arms. Noelle could hear her heartbeat. She regretted that Susie’s words, spoken in such a low, affectionate register, evaded her.
Nothing changed.
She was kneeling on the lake path, her phone pressed against her ear. Dad had fallen while putting up the festival lights.
Nothing changed.
She should have listened to Susie. It was all a dream. She hadn’t grown stronger, and she couldn’t save her father. The control for which she so foolishly reached had never been there at all. She’d been grasping at air.
She looked at Kris, who slumbered face-down at a picnic table. She had been so terribly wrong about them. She, wretch that she was, had drawn them in to her need to destroy herself, to scatter those shards irrevocably—or, better yet, to pulverize them till her vision of herself bled from her.
The thorns gnawed at her skin, but none of it was real.
Nothing changed.
She was kneeling at her father’s bedside, watching his chest rise and fall with his stuttered breaths. That horrid fluorescent light appeared chalky on his dry nose. She enveloped his hand in hers and shut her eyes, willing that magic to the surfaces of her trembling fingertips, but when she beheld him once more, not a hair on his body had shifted. She could do nothing for him.
Because a Noelle… is just a Noelle.