Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was always something inevitable about Kris Dreemurr.

Not in a big, dramatic way. Not like Asriel, who glowed in yearbook photos and brought home ribbons that curled like snakes on the kitchen table. And not like Dess, either, who had a fire in her bones and…

Kris wasn’t like that. Kris was just there. A soft fixture in the background. Bare ankles in the snow. The muffled clink of a lunch tray. Sticks brandished like swords to poke Noelle in the side and make her squeal. A static smile in family photos, untouchable.

Noelle had known them since they were small enough to get tangled in coat racks at the church Christmas pageant, Kris chasing her with a hand laced with cobweb. Her mom had laughed that thin, waspish laugh, standing next to Toriel Dreemurr, who clasped her hands and said, “They’d make a sweet couple, wouldn’t they?” and her eyes creased kindly.

Noelle didn’t remember how she got out of the coat rack. But she remembered those words.

In the summers, they used to bike around the cul-de-sac, careful to be home before the streetlights buzzed. She’d clip paper flowers to her spokes. Kris would fill their backpack with frogs and pencils and a pair of scissors they weren’t supposed to have. Dess would plug her gameshark into their consoles, and Kris would download screamers on her PC and hide under her bed until she turned it on. For a while, Noelle thought that meant they’d never really grow up.

But time has this way of going on even when you’re not ready. And then you blink, and the little games are over. The bikes rust. The frogs are gone. The scissors stay.

Somewhere in middle school, Kris started pulling their sleeves over their hands. Stopped answering the landline. Ate dinner in silence. They didn’t cry when Asriel left for college. They just got quiet. Quieter than usual, in a way that didn’t feel gentle. Something sealed off. Something like stone.

Noelle had already felt that kind of silence once.

It came after Dess vanished like a coin into water. One day her sister was there, teasing her and pulling her into windbreaker hugs. The next, there was just her room—still messy, still smelled like bubble gum and dry-erase markers. And nobody could say the right thing. Not even Kris.

After that, a small, cold thing lodged inside Noelle. A seed that never sprouted. Just sat there. She wondered sometimes if it was the same thing that lived behind Kris’s eyes.

They were still close, sort of. Their parents liked to pretend it was a given. The mayor would ask if she’d sat next to Kris that day in class, and Toriel would say, “Oh, Noelle brings out the best in them,” like it was something tender and noble. Like Kris was a prize Noelle could win if she stayed patient and good and smiled enough.

There was never a question about it—not from the adults, anyway. It was just something everyone seemed to expect. The sweet Dreemurr boy and the mayor’s daughter. Quiet, clean kids. Respectful. A little sad, maybe, but that made it more poetic. All they had was eachother, like those hallmark movies.

They’d get married one day, probably. No one said it outright, but it hung in the air like mothballs and cheap perfume.

But then Susie came.

And everything shifted.

She walked into school like she’d broken in. Big jacket, chipped teeth, boots that scuffed up the tile. She didn’t even look at people when she passed them. Just tossed her tray on the table and her boots right after.

Noelle didn’t mean to notice her. But she did. In little pieces. Her hands (claws…). Her voice. Her laugh, which sounded like it came from somewhere deep and half-wild. The way she leaned back in her chair like she wasn’t afraid of falling. Noelle would sidle closer to her in gym, write their initials in her notebook.

And then one day—suddenly—Kris and Susie were always together.

Just like that. Like two magnets.

Noelle tried not to think about it. About the way Kris used to wait for her outside homeroom, or how they always saved her a seat at lunch. They didn’t stop talking to her. Not exactly. But it wasn’t the same. She felt like the second choice in her own memories. Like the lights had dimmed just a little, and no one else noticed.

Sometimes she caught herself staring at Susie across the cafeteria. Not even staring, really—just looking. Trying to catch the edges of her. Like if she looked hard enough, she’d understand what Kris saw, what fault line they’d dug their fingers in to break through. Her stomach would knot and flutter and ache, like a sneeze she couldn’t get out.

She didn’t tell anyone. Of course she didn’t. That wasn’t how things were supposed to go. She was supposed to end up with the nice Dreemurr boy.

Maybe one day she’d grow up enough to say something.

Maybe one day she’d look at Kris and remember how they used to be, without feeling like someone left the gate open and forgot to tell her.

When they were eight, Noelle had a dream that she married Kris in her backyard. The arch was made of laundry line and tissue paper flowers. Her dad was there. The grass was soft and dewy, and the cake was vanilla with strawberry filling. When she woke up, she kept the dream close, like a bead you don’t show anyone in case it rolls away.

Back then, their moms used to joke about it. Wouldn’t it be cute, Mayor Holiday would say, setting down a mug with a ceramic clack, if Noelle married the nice Dreemurr boy?
Toriel would smile the way adults do when they think something small is funny and also final. Kris is very sweet, she’d say, very quiet. They’d treat her well.
Noelle would curl her hooves in her socks and look at Kris, who was half-hidden behind a book or licking a popsicle stick to nothing.

It was never a bad idea. That was the thing.
They would’ve been fine.

Not like Susie, who came into their lives like a meteor, denting everything in her path. Things moved when she was around, like locker doors and Noelle’s little heart. And Kris moved too. Quicker, sharper. Like they were trying to keep up with something or maybe like they’d just remembered they had legs and wanted to use them.

And Noelle, well. Noelle was still where she’d always been.

Sometimes she sees them—the two of them—shoulder to shoulder, like bookends from different sets. She knows Kris doesn’t talk much, and Susie doesn’t either, not in ways that fill silence. But their silences match. Theirs are not the same as hers, which are hollow and fidgety, full of things she’s afraid to say.

The sidewalks thawed unevenly, so your boots made that wet-sticky sound when you stepped on them. Patches of snow still held out in the shade like old secrets, gray at the edges, speckled with gravel. Noelle walked home the long way. Not because she had anywhere to be, but because the sun was out and the air didn’t hurt and the quiet didn’t press so hard when she was moving.

Kris had started walking Susie home. That was new. It wasn’t official or anything, but it kept happening. She’d see them in the parking lot, Kris with their hands in their hoodie pocket, Susie biting a straw from a juice box, her jacket always slipping off one shoulder. It made Noelle’s stomach tighten and bloom, like heat behind the eyes before a migrane.

When they were little, it used to be her and Kris. Well—Kris and Asriel, and her, like a button sewn on the edge of a sleeve. New, decorative. Still part of it. Their parents used to joke about it all the time. Oh, the Dreemurr boy and the Mayor’s daughter! Like they were a matching set of china. Their moms liked to have coffee together and say things like “well-behaved” and “so mature for their age.” Toriel had a kind voice, like a bedtime book. Noelle’s mom had one like a locked cabinet.

It never felt like falling in love. Not with Kris. It felt like homework: something you were just supposed to do. And she tried. She really did.

She still remembers the long walks home from school with Kris. Not hand-holding, not really talking, just that feeling of someone next to you who you knew. Who had always known you. A presence so familiar it didn’t even register most days. You don’t notice your own heartbeat until it stutters, or someone looks for it.

Noelle never told anyone about the time Kris painted a streak of red food dye on their lip and played dead in the middle of the schoolyard. It had scared her so badly she cried, and when she ran to get a teacher, Kris opened one eye and laughed so hard they almost choked.
Later that day, she told them she hated them. She didn’t.
She just didn’t know what to do with someone who could vanish like that, on purpose.

Kris’s room has trophies on one side and nothing on the other. Noelle remembers that. The way Asriel’s half glows with old gold and certificates curling at the corners. The way Kris’s bed was always neat. Like they never slept. Like they didn’t want to leave any trace they were ever there.

It feels like that for her now, too. There’s a little blue bell of grief she carries in her chest, and it only rings when something feels too close to a memory.
She doesn’t talk about Dess. Or her father. Or the way she always seems to be arriving just after something has already happened. Or the way Kris doesn’t look at her the way they used to.
They used to look at her like they were with her. Now, they look at her like she’s part of a dream they’re not sure they had, hazy at the corners.

Sometimes she wonders if that’s growing up; Watching people walk past you on the road while you’re still trying to tie your shoes.

Noelle still sometimes hears her mom sigh when looking at the fridge. There’s one magnet of her and Kris at the fair. They’re maybe ten. They’ve got cotton candy on his face. She’s wearing a pink sunhat. Their hands are sticky from holding the same cone. Her mom always used to say, ”someday you’ll get married and show this to your kids.”

She thinks about that more than she should. The idea of it. Of settling. Of just being what everyone expected. It would be simple, wouldn’t it?

But then she sees Susie sitting backwards on a cafeteria chair, chewing gum with her mouth open, and she knows she’s already too far gone.

It’s not that she wants to marry Kris. Not anymore. That dream dried out like pressed flowers in the back of a book. But sometimes she thinks about how her mom still talks like it might happen. Will happen. You two used to be inseparable, she says, stirring coffee with a peppermint stick, her painted lips pressed thin like she’s remembering something better than it was again.
And she smiles, like she’s trying to will it into being. Like if she says it enough, they’ll all go back to being small and safe and a little bit stupid.

Noelle doesn’t have the heart to correct her.
She just nods. And smiles. Maybe one day she’d look at Kris and remember how they used to be, without feeling like someone left the gate open and forgot to tell her.

Without feeling like everyone else was running ahead while she stood in place,

waiting for someone to come back.

Chapter Text

When Noelle was small, she was told she’d marry Kris Dreemurr.

Not in so many words, but in the way adults said things like, “You two are always together,” and, “Wouldn’t that be sweet?” Her mother used to fix her with this look, equal parts amused and certain, every time she came home with chalk on her fingers and scuffed knees. Playing with the Dreemurr boy again? she’d ask, even though Kris was already going quiet back then. Even though Kris had already started drawing shapes in the dirt instead of talking. Even though they never really felt like a boy.

But Noelle was polite. She nodded and smiled. She said yes, ma’am. She said he was very kind.

By middle school, the expectations calcified like plaque. A good boy from a good family, a good girl from a good one too. Toriel taught Sunday school back then. Mayor Holiday shook her hand every Easter. They had a little pond behind the Dreemurrs’ house, and once, while feeding ducks with her shoes off, her mother said, “You could do worse than someone like Kris.”

She’d said it with a smile that just twisted the curl of her lips, a distant one, the same one she wore when talking about dresses or old hymns.

At the time, Noelle didn’t know what she wanted. She knew how to be good, though. So she nodded.

Kris changed. But not all at once.

It was like watching the tide go out when you hadn’t noticed the moon. It started with silence. With Kris pulling away at the seams—speaking less, slipping out of reach without ever physically moving. It wasn’t anything dramatic. Noelle didn’t cry about it. Just noticed, one day, that he was no longer where she’d left him.

Then came Susie.

The two of them were suddenly everywhere together. Sitting at the back of class. Sharing lunch. Laughing at things no one else heard. It hit like cold water. Not jealousy, exactly. Something stranger. Like seeing someone build a new house in a field where you’d always imagined one day planting your own.

Noelle watched them from across the cafeteria. Watched Susie laugh until Kris snorted milk through their nose. Watched Susie bump shoulders with them like they were made of something she could knock over and still trust to get back up.

And suddenly, Noelle’s little peach-pit heart began to ache.

She’d never felt this way before. Not really. There had been boys she’d found cute. Girls she’d noticed in summer dresses. But Susie? It wasn’t the same. It was sharper, meaner. Like something blooming where it shouldn’t.

Her mother would never approve. Susie smoked sometimes and swore loudly and didn’t come to church. She had a scar on her mouth and her jacket sleeves were torn and Noelle could imagine the exact look her mom would give if she ever brought her home.

Noelle never tried.

There’s a kind of grief that doesn’t have a date. Dess had a funeral, but Noelle’s grief never ended. It hung in the corners of things, like dust on picture frames, sending little motes like spores drifting through the air.

She didn’t cry all the time. She got good grades. She smiled when adults asked her questions. But something inside her stayed frozen.

She thought maybe Kris understood that part of her. Or they used to. But now they were disappearing too, just like everyone else. Asriel had gone to college, and even though Kris didn’t say anything, Noelle could see the hollowed-out space where he used to stand.

Everyone was going somewhere. Susie was getting louder, more confident. Kris was getting quieter, but not in the same way—this quiet had edges. It meant something. Like a secret, held close.

Noelle stayed the same. She had the same room, the same piano lessons, the same walks past the church. Some days, she wondered if her childhood had been a hallway with only one door, and she’d walked through it and found herself back where she started.

She never told anyone how much it hurt.

Sometimes, she thought about what might have happened if things had gone the way the adults imagined.

She’d marry Kris. Probably stay in town. She’d go to church with her mom. Kris would wear a nice shirt and stand quietly beside her. Maybe they’d live in a quiet house near the pond where the ducks still came in spring.

It wouldn’t be bad. It might even be nice.

But she’d never kiss Susie. Never hear that laugh up close. Never run her hands through her stupid, tangled, wonderful hair or say all the dumb, honest things she’d been holding onto for years.

Kris still looked at her sometimes like they remembered everything. Like they knew her, really knew her. And that hurt worse than anything, because even knowing her, they’d still gone so far ahead.

She watched their back as they walked away from school with Susie, shoulders brushing.

She walked home alone.

The air was cold. The sun went down slower these days, the clouds hanging low like they’d forgotten how to move.

Noelle pulled her coat tighter and kept walking.

She still had choir practice tonight. Her mom would ask how her day went. She’d smile and say fine, and mean it a little less every day.

And still, in some soft place in her chest, she hoped maybe tomorrow—just maybe—someone would see her standing there and come back for her.