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Today kicks ass, Susie thought. Got free pancakes and sick juice, got to hang out with Noelle, and to top it all off, now there’s a severed hand!
Of course, the thing wiggling under Noelle’s paper mâché angel probably wasn’t a severed hand. It was probably just a mouse (cute), or a cockroach (sick), or a freak hybrid mouse-cockroach (???). Normal things that scurried around basements and climbed holiday trees and flipped breaker switches.
Huh. Come to think of it, would Noelle still want to raise it together if it turned out to be a cockroach? She’d gotten over her fear of mice... somehow... but that didn’t mean she’d be cool with all creepy-crawlies. Maybe cockroaches were where she drew the line.
The thought of not raising a pet with Noelle sent a weird ache panging through Susie’s gut, churning through the pancake mush. She hesitated at Noelle’s doorway to glance back at the angel figure.
It didn’t move like a cockroach. It sort of... wiggled and pulsed, actually, in steady slow thumps like a wimpy drum player. And only to one side of the table, jittering along towards--
“Shit!” Susie lunged forward, grabbing the figure a second before it went toppling over the edge. Paper mâché crunched like dry toast under her fingers as she bared her teeth down at it. “I told you not to move an inch!”
Noelle stammered from her room. “Susie? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Susie grunted. She squeezed the figure tighter, flaking dried glue crumbs across her palm. “I got it. Hurry up and get that hamster cage, will ya?”
“Y-yes, Susie! Right away!”
Noelle’s voice faded out way too eagerly, lost behind rustling drawers and thudding boxes. Susie shifted her other hand to the bottom of the angel, meanwhile, where the cookie tray had been.
And... it was weird. She could feel the angel wiggling against her top hand, but not the other. No tiny mouse feet scratching against her fingers, or even tiny cockroach legs. Like whatever was stuck inside the figure was floating. And it was warm against her scales, almost hot. Through the cracks she’d made in the paper mâché, she kept spotting flickers of red, like blood.
...Maybe it really was a severed hand.
Susie raised an eyebrow, then grinned. What if she took a quick peek, before Noelle got back? Just so she’d know how to keep a hold on it. (And not at all because the curiosity was driving her nuts.)
She tipped the figure back, yawning it open against her palm like a paper mâché clam shell. She still couldn’t see any little mouse or cockroach or mouse-cockroach feet. Instead, warm red light washed over the lines on her palm, brighter than ever, and the steady thumping got louder. And louder. And brighter. And louder. And brighter. And...
And then, all at once, a bright red SOUL toppled out and started floating in Susie’s hand.
She almost, almost dropped it. Her eyes bulged and her shoulders jerked back, hard enough to knock her arm against the table and send a handful of snacks sliding greasily to the carpet. It was pure instinct that had her grasp at the SOUL as it tried to drift away.
“What the...?” she breathed. It felt like gripping a squishy lightbulb. The SOUL was hot, glowy, a little tingly, and all these other words Susie never thought she’d get to apply to holding a real actual SOUL, here, right now, in the real world instead of--
Shit. That’s right. She’d seen this red SOUL dozens of times in the Dark World, hadn’t she? Kris brought it out every time they fought, drawing the enemy bullets towards it and weaving it around like a performance. Hell, she’d felt the sting every time they botched a move and let the SOUL get hit. If it wasn’t for that SOUL taking the bulk of enemy bullet patterns, Susie wouldn’t have gotten close enough to ACT on half their battles.
But... that was in the Dark World, wasn’t it? Obviously Kris’s battle SOUL wasn’t the same as a real SOUL. Real souls were white, and floated in the opposite direction, and they turned to chalky dust when they left a body after dying. That was, like, Monster Anatomy 101.
But Kris isn’t a monster, are they?
Susie’s throat went dry. She shifted her grip, from squeezing the SOUL to cupping her hands around it. (Was that still too close? What was the tension hitbox on a real world SOUL?)
“I’m... going to check up on Kris,” Susie heard herself say. She thought she heard Noelle even answer, but for once she wasn’t listening to a single cute stutter Noelle had to say.
No, no, no. Kris was just HERE. This is NOELLE’S HOUSE. There’s nothing here that can hurt anyone, even a tiny weak human. Definitely nothing that could hurt them enough to make them... for them to...
She remembered the Knight, looming against the darkness like a shadow on a shadow. She remembered it drawing its knife and hitting their SOUL so hard none of them could move. Not even Susie could stand up after that, and Ralsei was just a pile of fluff, and Kris...
Why hadn’t she checked up on Kris? Damnit, she was supposed to be learning healing! If any of that damage had carried over to the real world somehow... or if the Knight knew they’d be here for the codes and had been lying in wait, black knife in hand...
No. She wouldn’t think about it.
“Kris!” Susie shouted, trying and failing to keep the panic out of her voice. “Where are you? Say something, idiot!”
No answer--except, a sound. Something crackling in the kitchen, like garbage static noise. Or maybe like the Knight, gargling words through its messed up, jagged not-a-mouth.
Susie didn’t bother opening the kitchen door. That’d take too much time. She crashed through it, snapping it clean off its hinges and leaving a Susie-shaped hole in the wood frame. Tiny splinters sprayed across her front, and she cupped her hands tighter around the SOUL, shielding it from any projectiles.
She didn’t know if it could survive even a single hit out here.
“Leave them alone!” she screamed, glaring up at...
Nothing. Mostly nothing. Just Kris, sitting at the kitchen counter with a half-finished glass of chocolate milk and their phone, staring up at Susie with bald shock.
Except they looked different, didn’t they? Their eyes, normally intense red in either the Light World or Dark World, were dull and tired. They sat hunched in on themself, even smaller and more washed-out than usual in the Holiday’s massive, overbright kitchen.
“Susie...?” they asked, and even their voice sounded different from how Susie knew it. More deadpan and flat, with none of the speaker-like reverb that gave it so much depth and authority in the Dark World. (None of the usual soul to it.) They straighted up, shoving their phone into a pocket and staring up at her like she was the weird one, here.
No Knight. No gushing dark fountains. No knives or swords, except a few butterknives drying in the sink and the katana still smudged with fruitcake hanging just over the stove. So what had knocked out their SOUL...?
Susie glanced back at the half-finished milk glass.
Of course.
She lunged forward, swiping it off the counter and letting it shatter against the kitchen tiles as Kris jolted back in surprise. At the same time, Susie shoved the SOUL forward in her other hand, jamming it against Kris’s chest.
To her relief, it went right back in, sliding through skin and bone and blood like it was never solid in her hands to begin with. Its steady, rapid thumping fell into rhythm with Kris’s heavy breathing, its feverish warmth fading into Kris’s usual, human-like toastiness.
The room smelled like chocolate flakes and tile cleaner. Kris stared up at her with brighter, more alert, more soulful eyes, and Susie smiled back in pure relief... before smacking the side of their head, just a few inches from their smudged milk mustache.
“Dumbass! Why would you drink milk without checking the expiration date?” Susie checked the fridge, skimming over frozen leftovers and pretending she knew where an expiration date was. “You know Noelle’s parents are always busy. That stuff’s probably, like, a decade old. You could’ve died!”
Kris blinked up at her, seeming to consider their options but choosing to say nothing. They didn’t need to; their expression said it all, and Susie glared back.
“What’s with that face? You think just because I eat moss and chalk that I’m not allowed to have standards? Those are different! They have, like, vegetables and calcium and stuff.” She slammed the fridge shut. It helped the shakiness in her bones a little.
They didn’t respond. Their hands, half-hidden in their sweater sleeves, patted at their chest as if they were trying to process the weight of their own SOUL. She couldn’t quite read their expression, either; their mouth was a thin line, their eyes bright but narrowed in heavy thought.
And they looked so small. Susie couldn’t get over that. Back when she’d first moved to Hometown, it’d made it so easy to bully them--look at this puny human-thing, trying to fit in with a classroom full of monsters. Look at this puny nerd, holding up a pencil sword against the Card Kingdom bad guys just because some other nerd in a green hat said so.
Now, though? Now it freaked her out. Did they know they were small? They had to, right? That they were small and alone in the real world, and anything could knock them out so hard their SOUL left their body and they started dyin--
Susie turned to grasp Kris’s shoulder. Still here. Still breathing.
“Look.” She tried again. “You gotta be careful, okay? We gotta keep ourselves together so we can kick that Knight’s ass and get Undyne back. So, don’t do anything reckless.” She forced a grin so wide it hurt. “If anything happened to you at this point...”
She trailed off. Squeezed their shoulder.
“...Nevermind. Don’t worry about it, actually. It’s not a problem, because you got me looking out for ya. And Ralsei, too.” This time, the grin came more naturally. “Even if you drink some crappy expired milk and your SOUL falls out, or whatever, I’ll be here to shove it back in and save your life. Got it?”
They wouldn’t meet her eyes. But that wasn’t that weird, was it? Kris didn’t really do eye contact. And if they were breathing harder than usual, gripping the counter edge a little tight, that made sense.
Monster SOULs, for the most part, broke into dust once they left a body. Only human SOULs could exist outside a body, whether it was floating around to dodge bullets or getting stuck under a holiday tree decoration. Which meant Susie had no idea what it must feel like to have your SOUL come out, or how long it could last out on its own, or what its removal did to a human.
But judging from how pale and dead Kris looked without it... Susie had to guess it felt a lot worse in the Light World than it did during Dark World battles. That must’ve been why Kris looked so pained now, even as they leaned into Susie and nodded along.
“Got it,” they mumbled, the noise of their own voice echoing and distinct and familiar again, like Noelle’s chirping or Ralsei’s hums or Susie’s own barks. A nostalgic pattern of sounds.
And Susie, weak-kneed and head spinning with relief, forced herself to laugh and ruffle Kris’s hair and remind herself that it was okay. She’d put their SOUL back, and now here they were, awake and alert and the same as she’d ever seen them.
Everything was okay.
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