Chapter Text
The Holiday house loomed in front of Asriel like a foreboding castle instead of what it was, which was a nice, mid-sized two-story house that had just enough luxury to sprawl across a flat plot of land between two rows of brownstones. Its walls were whitewashed; tinsel lined the doors. He had to wonder why every time he came here, it was without either his parents’ or December’s mom’s knowledge or permission.
He knocked on the front door.
December opened it with a hockey stick in her hands, ready to swing.
“Oh, it’s you,” she sighed, lowering the stick.
She smiled.
“Hey, Azzy. C’mon in here before someone sees.”
She took him by his paw and pulled him over the threshold.
The inside of the Holiday house was a lot like the outside. White as snow, with tinsel and evergreen wreaths cresting the doorframes and lining the mantelpiece over the fireplace. A dressed-up fir tree stood in the corner of the living room beside the TV. It was like walking into Snowdin, except not quite as cold (though the Holidays always did keep the thermostat low, which was merciful in the summer).
She wrinkled her nose and grabbed his ear. He froze. “You kept the tracking device on?”
She let go as hastily as she’d grabbed it. “Sorry,” she added, glancing sheepishly at anything else but him. “What, is that thing pinned through your ear or something?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What the fuck, really?”
“I was thinking about getting it pierced after this, anyway, so it’s no big deal…”
“An ear piercing and an eyepatch.” She headed for the kitchen and poured herself and Asriel a glass of soda. “Azzy, you realize you’re a puffy shirt and tricorn hat away from looking like a pirate.”
“Do you think I’d look good in a puffy shirt and tricorn hat?”
She stared at him, jaw slightly agape. The soda she was pouring kept pouring. Soon it would fill the glass right to the brim.
She’s starting to think that maybe she’s a bad influence on you, Frisk told Asriel.
“I think I’d look like two of your dad,” he added. “Because, uh… I’d be a buccaneer.”
With gritted teeth and eyes squeezed shut, she snorted out a pained laugh. Soda overfilled the glass and spilled out across the kitchen counter. “Oh, shit!”
“Sorry!” Asriel raced into the kitchen and grabbed a towel off the oven handle to help her mop it up. The puddle of soda fizzed and dripped. “I should’ve warned you about the glass, but… that was how Chara always filled their cups, so what you were doing just looked normal to me.”
December looked down at the mostly-empty glass. “Like, all the way to the brim?”
“Yeah, ‘til you could see it just starting to bulge. They said it was more efficient. Because, uh… it maximized the cup’s volume.”
“Well, that’s stupid. You can just pour yourself more if you’re still thirsty,” she said, taking another towel and helping him mop up the mess.
I think it’s cute, Frisk said. But I’m surprised they didn’t make a mess. They must have had very steady hands.
“Anyway, let’s just… do what we came here to do.”
“Y-Yeah, you said something weird was going on,” he said, remembering exactly why he’d rushed here so urgently and with such flagrant disregard for being grounded.
“It started with that voice on the phone,” she said, leading him upstairs. He ascended each step with a growing sense of unease curdling in his gut. “Then, I was out here in the upstairs hall, and I swear, there was some weird door that wasn’t supposed to be there—”
He grabbed her by the arms. “Don’t go in it!” His voice cracked and leaped maybe half an octave.
She yelped and wrenched herself free. “What?”
He lifted his paws off her. “Just… I-If you see a weird door that’s not supposed to be there, don’t go inside. Ever. No matter what. You didn’t, did you?”
“No! I wasn’t going to go inside a strange glowing door without you.” She reached the top of the stairs and pointed down the hall. “See, it’s right there, where the bonsai fir is supposed to—”
With tension gripping his heart, he looked where she was pointing. If Frisk could breathe, they would have had baited breath—he could feel their anxiety, their fear, all compounding on his own. They were as afraid as he was and their combined fear was more than the sum of its parts.
He was shaking like a leaf and couldn’t stop himself. He almost wanted to close his eye, but he didn’t. He forced himself not to.
There was nothing there but a little table with a bonsai fir tree on it underneath a window.
“You see that tree?” she asked.
He nodded.
“That’s what’s supposed to be there.”
“Um… yeah, I figured.” He sighed, relieved. “It’s gone.”
“You know something about that weird door, huh?”
His finger traced the scar on the back of his paw.
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about it. But if you see a door where it doesn’t belong, and you can see colors dancing in the gap between it and the floor…”
That weak, feverish plea rang in his ears: I don’t want to be nothing.
I don’t want to be nothing.
I don’t want to be nothing.
She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t sweat it. That’s one time I won’t stick my snout where it doesn’t belong.”
She smiled. It was a strained smile, barely more than a grimace.
“I guess you should get back to your prison, I mean, house, before you get in trouble with your mom.” A dark brown lock of frizzy hair twisted around one of her fingers. “Thanks for checking up on me. I don’t know what the hell I was so scared over, but… thanks. I’ll let you know if any spooky doors show up again.”
He took a step back down the stairs.
But only just one step. He couldn’t bring himself to go any farther.
“I can, uh… I can stay until your mom and Noelle get back.”
“You’ll get in deep shit.”
“You don’t have to be alone. Since I’m here, I guess we can do what friends do and… hang out?”
She chuckled. “My mom’s gonna kill you and your mom’s gonna kill me. But sure. Let’s hang out—”
She froze, except for her ears. They twitched and pointed toward the stairs.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That! Didn’t you hear her? Just now!”
She pushed past him and went down to the landing, then froze again. Asriel strained his ears, but all he heard was the faint whine of the bit of tinnitus he had in his left ear. The house was quiet as a tomb otherwise.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Shh!” She held up a finger. “Listen! There she is again. C’mon, your ears are bigger than mine, Azzy.”
She turned the corner down the stairs. Asriel followed her. His heart had started racing faster and faster. He hadn’t noticed before how cold it was in here.
“Who’s she?”
“Dunno, but she sounds Elly’s age.” She turned the corner again and headed down into the basement.
Asriel pushed past her and held his arm out over her chest.
“Hey—”
“Let me go in front,” he said. “Please. I like you the way you are.”
He knew that didn’t make much sense to her.
“Let me go first.”
“Alright,” she said.
The two of them entered the basement. Swaths of darkness shrouded its contents, blurring them into indecipherable shapes. Was something moving down there? Asriel could swear he saw a flurry of something scampering across the shadows, but his eyes couldn’t separate it from the motionless bulks lurking in the dark.
Dreading what he might see—or what he might not see—he snapped his fingers and conjured a golden flame to light his way.
December reached for a chain dangling from the ceiling and yanked it. A lightbulb turned on.
He extinguished the flame, and the two of them took a look around.
It wasn’t anything like upstairs—hardwood and carpet was replaced with bare concrete, and while everything upstairs was fancy, pristine, and cutting-edge, down here, it was all hand-me-downs and antiques: worn-down wooden chairs, a battered and well-loved sofa in front of a vintage television, an old bed with faded sheets, and shelves sagging under the weight of old detritus.
But there was nobody down here that could have been calling out for help—nobody but Asriel and December.
Her ears drooped. “I could’ve sworn I heard something. It was the same voice I heard over the phone.” She sighed; her shoulders slumped. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
He mustered a laugh. “I’m just glad there’s nothing to be afraid of down here.”
“Guess we’ll hang out in the basement. That way, you’ll have someplace to hide if Mom comes back while you’re still around.” She lifted her arms and gestured to the basement’s detritus. “Welcome to the ruins of the ancient Holiday house.”
“You took all your furniture with you from Snowdin?”
“It beat sleeping on the floor. But sooner or later, Mom replaced everything. Can’t have an old bed in a new house,” she muttered, patting the side of the old bed. “Can’t have a couch with eggnog stains sitting in front of a fancy TV. Mayor Holiday’s got standards now. None of the stuff down here was good enough anymore.”
She closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. “But it’s nice down here,” she sighed. “It’s like home.”
There was something comforting about basements, he thought. To a kid, especially. It was a place that was allowed to be cluttered and messy. It was a little safe place, more private than a living room. He and Chara had always felt freer down in the old basement in New Home. It was where they’d practiced their creepy faces and he’d filmed videos with the lens cap on.
He expected Frisk to make some comment there, but they were silent—hearing about that door really had given them a fright.
“Well, don’t stand on ceremony. Take a seat,” December said, sitting down on the side of the bed. It sagged precariously under her weight; it would probably collapse if anyone tried to lie in it.
He was going to, until something on the wall caught his eye. It looked at once too fancy to belong here and also like it fit in perfectly with the rest of the so-called junk.
There, mounted on a black matte in an ornate silver frame, was a ragged old paper placemat from the Snowed Inn with a child’s drawing of some sort of slender, spiky creature with sharp antlers on it.
He crossed his arms and appraised it like he was standing in a fancy art gallery. “Hey, Dess, what’s this?”
December turned her head, followed his gaze, and cringed. “I forgot all the fuck about that,” she mumbled. “Dad… had that framed for me when I was like, eight. It was, uh… I had this character who was sort of like an alter ego, and…” Her face scrunched up tighter and tighter with each word. “I’m… sorry you had to see it.”
“Sorry? Why? It’s cute!”
He swore he could see her cheeks flush under her fur. She scratched at her throat. “I mean, I… wouldn’t have brought it from our old house if it was up to me, but… damn, Dad fucking loved that drawing. He said it was his third-greatest treasure.”
“Third-greatest?”
“Me, Elly, and her.” She rolled her eyes. “Can’t imagine why Mom would lose out to a drawing of the Knight of the Twilight Reverie.”
She ought to have been glad she never had to be her character, Asriel thought to himself—something that spiky would be really hard to hug.
He couldn’t help but snicker.
She got up and nudged him away from it. “Let’s stop looking at it, okay, Azzy?”
“N-No! No, Dess, I’m not laughing at it, I’m laughing with it!”
She pressed her hands against his back and started pushing him toward the stairs. “No! No! We’re going to my bedroom, allons-y, geronimo, etc.”
His shoes slipped on the concrete. “I think it looks cool!”
“That just makes it worse!”
“Wait! I had a persona with lots of spikes, too!”
That got her to stop. “…You did?”
“Yeah, he had long sharp claws and big horns and spiky wings that glowed like rainbows, and, uh… I think I still have the old drawing I made of him when me and Chara were little. Dad didn’t frame it or anything, but he kept all my old stuff after I died, so I bet I could dig it up from the basement. If you’d, uh, like to see it…”
Dess offered a strained smile. “…What did you call him?”
Asriel was in too deep. There was no turning back.
“…The Absolute God of Hyperdeath.”
Watching the last of her composure collapse was like seeing a controlled demolition for an old skyscraper. It just crumbled straight down to the ground.
A strained whimper quickly turned into a fraught giggle, and then into an unrestrained chuckle.
“It’s… not… that bad of a name, is it?”
She started howling, bracing herself against a bookcase so she wouldn’t fall to the floor and curl up in a fetal position. “The Absolute God of Hyperdeath?”
“I-It’s… It’s not that much worse than the Knight of the Twilight Reverie!”
“It’s so much worse!”
“Well, I’m sure my character was… uh, stronger!”
“You wanna bet? The Knight had this super cool attack where she sliced through reality and pulled it apart and there were fangs that would fly at you—”
“Well, I—I mean, the Absolute God of Hyperdeath—could tear the stars out of the sky and throw them at people, and shoot comets out of his hands—”
She grabbed him by the arm to steady herself. “She could summon giant knives and shoot them with her mind—”
He pulled her up. “He had the Chaos Buster and Chaos Saber—”
“And there was the Sanguine Slash and the Hall of Blades—”
“He had this energy vortex thing called ‘Hyper Goner’—”
“She had an energy vortex thing, too! The Crystal Nova! And it was so much cooler than yours!” She got closer into his face, eyes agleam with conviction, the collar of his shirt bunched up in her fist.
“You don’t know that!”
“My persona could totally beat up your persona!”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Back then, I had all the powers of a god!”
They both stopped. The echoes of their parting shots rang in their ears. The empty air between them felt thick and heavy, like the air in a thunderstorm. Their noses were maybe only an inch apart. Her eyes, wide, met his eye.
December looked a little confused for a moment.
He realized how absolutely unhinged what he’d just said was.
“I-I mean, ‘he,’” he stammered. “I-I-In the, uh, the games Chara and I played. He had all the powers of a god—”
The next thing he knew, her hands were pressed against his cheeks, like the bread in an Asriel sandwich.
And Asriel sandwiches, like most sandwiches, didn’t talk.
The next thing he knew, their teeth had just clinked together like glasses. Every part of his body started to run on overdrive. He could almost swear there was steam coming out of his ears.
He’d seen them in movies, of course, and read about them in books, but he was in no way prepared for how hot and wet actual kisses on the mouth were.
Meanwhile, while his brain was melting and leaking out of his ears, he found himself with no idea what to do with his hands, so he hugged her instead. It seemed like almost the right thing to do, or at least not the wrong thing.
She pulled away and caught her breath. He didn’t. He’d forgotten how to. She took an awkward step away from him and let go of his face. Her arms just hung limp at her sides.
The cool air of the basement and the icy touch of the bare concrete bleeding through the soles of his shoes was suddenly a welcome relief.
She looked away from him. “Looks like the Knight…” she panted, clenching her fists, “wins this round…”
He stood there, dazed, barely even aware of her parting shot. His skin was buzzing. He tried to think about how he could respond to her argument, but his thoughts just hit a wall of rosin-scented fog and bounced off.
Unfortunately, Frisk was just as dumbfounded as he was, and was no help at all.
“Th-That’s cheating,” he finally stammered.
“That’s creative winning, big man.” She flopped over the back of the sofa and started fishing around for the remote.
He wasn’t sure what to do. She’d just kissed him. If the air wasn’t so cool down here, he thought he’d be melting. His heartbeat was fluttering in his chest.
He got his brain working just enough to ask Frisk for any ideas.
None. Still silent. He or December hadn’t upset them, had he?
He tried to find something to focus on and found the bookcase she’d been leaning against. There were a bunch of papers jammed between two musty old legal textbooks; he pulled one of them loose.
“Was that your first time?” December asked.
He’d been about to look at the paper. “First time what? Kissing? W-With a girl?”
“With anyone.”
“Gosh, I—kissing like that, I guess…” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“I could tell. You really suck at it.”
He looked down at the paper.
“But hey, sucking’s just the first step to being good at something.”
The TV turned on and filled the air with a faint static hum while Asriel turned his attention back to the drawing.
On the paper were three characters, inked in marker over faded pencil sketch marks and colored in with colored pencils; blue, pink, green. Underneath the drawing, in smudged handwriting, were the words:
DON’T FORGET
“Th-Thanks for taking over the position for me, Sans,” Alphys said, powering down her computer while Papyrus pushed a cart with Sans’ equipment across the production floor of the New Royal Laboratory was looking just a little emptier now. “I didn’t know you wanted it.”
“I don’t, but my guys could use the extra space,” Sans said. “Our lab was getting cramped. We hardly had room to swing a cat anymore.”
She took one last look at the lab. “Take good care of it, okay?”
“I’ll treat it like I treat my own home.”
Papyrus passed them by. “He means to say I will keep the place as spotless as our polished craniums!”
Sans chuckled. “Don’t be ridiculous. When it gets too out of control, I’ll just hire a maid service. That’s what they’re maid to do, after all.”
“When you do, can I stop by and watch, I mean, help?” Alphys asked. “N-Never mind. That was a joke! I’m a joke! Don’t mind me. I-I’ll be on my way out.”
She hurried away, but Papyrus stopped her. “Alphys! Not so fast! You’ll hang around the lab to teach my brother the ropes, won’t you? All this shiny new equipment he’s got—he could hurt himself on it! He won’t be half as much of a Royal Scientist without the previous one showing him the ropes!”
“I-I mean… I could’ve really used some onboarding from the old Royal Scientist before I got the job…”
“That’s the spirit! You have so much wisdom to pass on! Wait—you weren’t always the Royal Scientist?”
“Um… no? There’ve been Royal Scientists for centuries. The one before me just, uh… W-What was his name, again?”
While Papyrus gave Alphys the pep talk Sans couldn’t, Sans started stocking his new desk with the miscellaneous stuff from his old desk. A coffee mug with DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY printed on it, a fistful of old pens and pencils to put into the coffee mug, a strategically placed dirty sock for Papyrus to fuss over, a bottle of ketchup…
“Leaving the position you poured so much hard work and dedication to is a hard thing! It certainly works up an appetite! What do you say we celebrate with a heaping plate of spaghetti?”
“Th-That sounds, uh, nice, but, uh, I don’t have another position lined up yet…”
“It shall be my treat! Sans! Would you care to join Doctor Alphys and myself for a lovely spaghetti dinner on your new Royal Scientist salary?”
“Sure. You can put it on my tab.”
“We were hoping to go somewhere… less greasy than Grillby’s.”
“How am I gonna grease the wheels of scientific progress without Grillby’s cheesy fries?”
“Sans…”
“Alright. I’ll stay behind and get settled in, then.”
“He can be so dedicated when he wants to be. I know he will make you proud! Now, onward, to begin the next chapter of your scientific career!”
With a hand resting on her back, Papyrus guided Alphys out of the room and left Sans in peace to finish his work.
He spent the next hour stacking hot dogs, one after the other, to see how big of a tower he could make. With the help of one of Alphys’ industrial power lifters, he could get pretty close to the ceiling, until the tower fell under its own weight and hot dogs scattered every which way across the production floor.
That would give the maids plenty of enrichment, he thought, returning to his desk to finish moving in.
“Heh. You’re pretty patient, aren’t you?” he called out. “If you’re gonna linger, just be careful where you do it. You never know who else might be watching.”
Last but not least, placed lovingly in the desk drawer with the utmost care, was a poorly drawn picture of three smiling people on an old and yellowed card with softened and faded edges. Underneath the drawing, in smudged handwriting, were the words:
DON’T FORGET
“You wanna get a closer look? Alright. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
With a wink, he held up the card and