Work Text:
When Noelle is little, barely into school, she walks Dess’s room one afternoon to find the worst mess she’s ever seen. Unfolded maps that cover the floor, hiking boots from last year’s camping trip, Dad’s camera, a cheap compass, some books –wait, does the library even let people check out that many?–, a flashlight, and The Wiffle Bat, all surrounding one sheepish sister.
“Nelly!” She squeaks. “Um, didn’t you have skating lessons today?”
Sibling instinct tells Noelle to rat her out, but she stops. If Mom made them clean it up, Dess wouldn’t tell her what she was doing, would she? She might go her whole life stuck with that unanswered question. And in this moment of hesitation, Noelle’s curiosity wins.
“What’s all this stuff for?” The older girl looks relieved.
“Do you want to hear something creepy?”, asks Dess, who doesn’t wait for an answer before continuing, “Sometimes when we walk to church, I hear these weird sounds coming from the forest. Not, like, animal sounds either. I’m going to find it.”
Well, the junk on the floor makes sense now. She still has questions, though.
“Do Mom and Dad know about this?”
“They wouldn’t believe me”, she sighs.
The whole plan is scary, the thought of going unsupervised even more so, but she knows that her sister will protect her, and replies, “I believe you. Can I come?”.
Dess’s smile could rival the sun.
---
Two more people end up joining them. Asriel is a big kid, almost as old as her sister, so she doesn’t know him that well, but she’s seen him at church, or hanging out with Dess, and he’s nice enough. On the other hand, she is very familiar with Kris and their teasing, though they reached a truce after Dess “intervened”. Once they reach the entrance, the older kids start making a list of their supplies, so Noelle is left with only Kris to talk to.
“So… how do you feel about this whole thing?”
They pause to consider, then respond, “What if we run out of food?” It’s a reasonable question. Even combined, the team’s allowances can only afford so many granola bars.
“I think you can eat moss.”
“Moss?”
“Moss.”
“What does it–”, but before they can finish the question Asriel interrupts to tell them the inventory is finished, and the adventure begins.
It starts out as a normal hike. Birds call out to each other, sticks crack under their feet, and a pleasant breeze winds through the trees to keep everyone cool. The hiking trails haven’t been maintained in years, so Noelle’s not exactly sure of where they’re going, but Dess seems to have a plan.
The day wears on, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. Noelle is starting to suspect that her sister is playing some sort of weird prank on them, until she realizes the peace has been replaced by silence. The wind is still. The animals are gone. Even the cicadas have stopped singing, too afraid to move. In the absence of everything, she walks with her big sister and stays as close as she can.
Thankfully, Asriel notices the tension, and says, “Have you cleared World 4 yet? Kris and I just barely finished it last week.” Everyone jumps into conversation, and everything feels normal.
Odd silence aside, she hasn’t noticed anything, and neither has anyone else. It’s getting darker anyways, so they should probably head back before they get in trouble. Full of frustration, Dess finally turns and says, “We’re not covering enough ground. Nelly, you’re fine with staying with Kris and Asriel, right?”
“Hey, hang on,” Azzy protests, “why do I have to get stuck with the ba- OW!”
Kris kicks him in the shins.
It seems like Azzy’s about to poke them in the ribs in response, so Noelle chimes in, saying, “I don’t wanna walk home in the dark.” They pause, consider, and separate, and the fearless leader marches ahead.
They look around for a little while longer, but nothing new shows up, so they go home, and wait at the edge for Dess. She’s trying to console herself with the fact that Azzy and Kris are there too, but it feels hollow, even more so when she looks at them and sees the same terror.
It gets dark.
It gets darker.
In the dead of the night, her parents and the Dreemurrs come running towards them, with flashlights in their hands and tears in their eyes. She feels relaxed, thanks to that. Even if she and her friends would get lost, the grown-ups will find Dess and tell her to come home and it’ll work, because it always does.
Mom and Dad hug her as soon as they see her, and she holds on to them as hard as she can, just listening to their voices. She’s close enough to them, in fact, that she can feel the exact moment they become rigid.
“Noelle, honey, where’s your sister?”, her father asks.
Dad’s talking funny, pausing a little bit between each word, but she can think about that when they find Dess and go home.
“She’s still looking around. We’re not gonna get grounded later, right?” And then her shoulder feels wet, and she realizes those are her father’s tears. She steps back and turns towards her other parent, eyes wide in confusion. “Mom,” the child asks, “you and Dad know where Dess is, right?”
And then Mom, who never loses her temper, who is a force of calm determination, who always knows how to fix things, falls to the ground sobbing.
They’re not doing anything.
They don’t know what to do.
And if her parents can’t find Dess, maybe no one can. Maybe there’s no hope. Maybe all she can do is cry.
So she does.
Noelle stays there for a minute and a day, with more tears than she thought she had, until her mother takes one hand and her father takes the other, and the three of them start on the long walk home.
---
None of them do much for several weeks. The only exception is when her parents go to the police station and ask about the search. No one finds anything.
It just doesn’t make sense. Her sister, who beats up bullies, who everyone calls the smartest kid in her class, who watches scary movies without flinching, can’t die. She’s too tough for wild animals, and with all of their preparation, she couldn’t have gotten lost. Noelle’s sure that her big sister is still out there.
But when she tells the police, and then anyone else who’ll listen, they just shake their heads sadly and refuse to listen.
Okay. Fine. Grown-ups are a dead end, but she’s still alone.
“Yeah, I thought it was weird too. Remember how it got all creepy that evening? Maybe whatever’s behind that got her.” If this was for anything else, she’d yell at Kris for trying to scare her, just like normal. But this is different. They know what happened, they wouldn’t lie or be a jerk about this. And even if she doesn’t really know Asriel, he’s still her sister’s friend, and she can tell he wants an answer as badly as she does.
Pulling herself back to the conversation, she thinks about Kris’s suggestion, and has to admit that they have a point. Still, there’s one glaring issue.
“How do we know what made all that stuff happen?”, she argues.
Kris pauses and starts sipping their hot chocolate in thought, but Asriel has his own ideas.
“Look, we don’t know right now, but people tell ghost stories all the time! Some of them should be true.”
“You just say these things all the time to scare people!”
“Hey, tell that to my sibling, not me!”, Asriel sputters.
The sibling in question, now with whipped cream on their nose from excess hot chocolate consumption, pipes up with, “I bet the library has records. They have all sorts of stuff there”, and they turn to their brother, “like that art book you got with all the-”
Asriel, bright red, covers their mouth and nearly yells, “Okay then, what about going around town and just investigating everything by ourselves?”
Everyone in the restaurant stares. Embarrassed, the three of them pay for their hot chocolate and practically run out the door. It doesn’t matter, though. Noelle’s going to find out what happened to Dess, and nothing’s going to stop her.
---
Hometown is too small to avoid anyone, even if you try. Bratty and Catty always fall into arguments because. If Snowy has a new comedy routine, everyone will hear it at some point. Mr. Asgore and Ms. Toriel still bump into each other at the grocery store every so often.
So that just makes the one exception so much weirder.
Between Bratty’s family and Mr. Asgore’s house, there’s another building, tilted on its side halfway up, like the top is too heavy for the rest of it. Whenever Noelle walks by with her parents, Dad likes to go on about no one living there, while mom just sighs and tells her to “come up with better jokes than her father”.
Still, it makes her wonder. If the house looks like that, why is it still there?
She decides to find out one day. Asriel and Kris, and their parents are still… figuring things out, so they’re too busy to come with her, but she’ll tell them about it later.
Excited and curious, she runs to the house and knocks three times, as hard as her tiny hands can manage.
No answer.
“Hello?” she asks, but there’s still no response.
She waits for a while longer, repeating her knocking. It feels rude, but the potential for a new bit of evidence takes priority. Eventually, she hears a reply, so quiet she can barely hear it. It’s like whoever is behind the door is afraid to speak.
“Sorry, I’m not presentable at the moment. Come back later.”
Noelle jumps a little. Despite her hopes of speaking to the mysterious resident, she didn’t quite expect for someone to live there. Still, she should get some answers from them.
“Are you ever presentable?”
Quickly, the voice responds.
”No.”
“So… you don’t leave? Ever?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you have people that would miss you?”
But they don’t reply, no matter how many times she asks, and she walks home, thinking only of how awful it must be to be alone, with nobody even giving you a second thought.
---
She’s started hanging out with Catti after school. The other girl isn’t really into video games, and Noelle likes her hair, ears, and nails the way they are (and what would Mom say if she saw that!), but they are united by one thing: ghosts.
Okay, not just ghosts, but it’s less of a mouthful than “paranormal” or “supernatural”, and they’re mostly what Noelle is looking for, anyways. The other girl likes to rant about summoning demons so her parents “finally leave her alone”, but she’s willing to help Noelle with her goal.
Every few days, she still looks around for new suggestions with Kris, but her mind is elsewhere. The idea of being able to talk to her sister again gives her a sense of hope she can’t really articulate. Maybe just that it would be nice to remember. There are plenty of things she did when she was little that she doesn’t remember, and she’ll have to tell her about everything that’s happened over the years. They’d laugh, and talk, and Dess would call her Nelly, the way no one else can.
She can’t quite remember how her sister used to say her nickname anymore.
All of the dreams keep her going, and it finally feels like she’s getting somewhere, where maybe, just maybe, everything will work. After months of work, she tries to contact Dess. Yet despite trying again and again for hours, nothing comes.
---
Kris has been… strange… lately. Quiet. Says they’re fine when she tries to talk to them. She’s brought it up a couple times, but of course everyone just says they’re always strange, and then ignore her when she tries to clarify. The only person who didn’t was Ms. Toriel, who agreed, turned away with a sad look in her eyes. Noelle didn’t press any further that time.
She wants to help them, of course, but pressing the issue might make things worse. She’d ask her parents for help, but Mom’s always busy, and Dad’s always tired. So, she decides on the next option: finding a new lead.
Some may call it a distraction, sure, but it always helps her when she thinks about…
Well, that’s not important right now.
With her mind set on a new mystery, as soon as she hears about a new rumor, she dashes headfirst into research. Supposedly, there’s a voice people can hear at the lake, muttering to itself.
As investigations go, it starts out rather successfully. The more they look, the more they find, with plenty of people giving reports. Kris is there to back her up when people turn the other way, while she glares at anyone who gives them a hard time. They fall into the familiar rhythm of heading to the library each day after school, flipping through any books they think will help, or checking page after page on the library computers. For a while, it works, and she starts to believe that maybe it'll go somewhere, that she’ll be one step closer to finding her sister, and the two of them are excited.
Of course, it never works.
---
You would think that after enough failures, it would start to hurt less, or that you could turn your pain into determination. At least, she thought it went that way.
How many leads has she tried? How many times has she deceived herself? How many afternoons were spent in the library, looking for answers?
How many times has she stood in an empty room filled with all the joys of a twelve-year old girl, and wondered, “what if?”
It feels like the day where everything happened. The night where the world felt so small and empty, and she could only sob and wish things were different. She feels the same way she did then, helpless and alone. Then, just as she feels her throat tighten and her eyes begin to burn, she stops and thinks.
She’s not alone.
Repeating this to herself, Noelle gets up, and heads over to her oldest friend, the one she can trust above everyone else to listen. Kris greets her at the door, takes one look at her, and welcomes her in without a word. She’s not quite sure what to say, but ignores it, and speaks.
“Can we talk?” They turn towards her, nodding carefully, and she continues.
“What if there’s nothing? What if she just died that night, nothing weird about it, and I’ve just been lying to myself for years?” She sounds frantic, but she just needs to say everything.
“I’m just- it feels like I’m betraying her, if I give up. She was the most important person in my life, and… I don’t want to lose that.” She sighs. “I- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just… said all of that.”
Kris pauses for a minute, lost in thought, and replies.
“I had a fight with Azzy a few months ago. A really bad one.” They breathe in, and continue.
“He was visiting from college, and he called all of our research junk, and it went downhill from there. I… we still haven’t made up. The worst part is, sometimes I think he’s right. But I don’t want to just stop either, like I don’t care about her.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? I’m sure someone could have helped. I could have helped.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that way at the time.” Then they smirk. “You know, you’re kind of a hypocrite, the way you say that.” And they’re right, and she knows it, and then they sound as smug as possible, because it seems like Kris can only go for so long without being annoying. Noelle pushes them off the couch, and they yell in shock.
“So, what should we do now?”, she asks, once she’s done laughing at the look on their face.
“I think it might help to go to the graveyard. Sort your thoughts out.”
She walks there and takes a moment to appreciate the scenery. The leaves are falling off of trees, but some of autumn’s hues still remain, and she can see flowers laid out by tombs. She hasn’t seen the cemetery in a long time
Noelle finds Dess’s grave and loses herself in thought.
It’s different, sitting there. All those memories of her sister, engraved on a tombstone and laid on the grave and always, always with her. Maybe she won’t lose Dess.
She stays for a while, and only leaves when the sun starts to set. As she walks past the church, still only half-focused, she sees something out of the corner of her eye, and stops.
A wide path leads through the woods, one she knows has never been there before. As she listens, as closely as she can, a horrible noise fills her ears, not natural, not man-made. It’s almost like a sound she once heard described by another girl, many years ago.
There’s no way to know what could happen, where the path leads, if she’ll even return.
She could find the truth. And, after years of searching for it, she can’t resist that.
Mind made up, Noelle walks into the unknown.