Work Text:
A figure in a faded, sleeveless t-shirt barrels down the half-pipe, red-streaked hair billowing behind her from under the chunky skater's helmet. It's scratched, plastered with stickers and chalk marker signatures from friends and fellow skaters. The camera pans out, a wide shot to show the sheer scale of the thing, but they can still see the flash of teeth as she grins.
Noelle whistles as the monster on screen—they tuned in halfway, and the volume's down too low to hear the commentators exclaiming her name—balances on the nose of her skateboard at the top of the pipe, does a little wink-and-salute to the camera, then kicks off.
Kris isn't sure when they turned into "TV with dinner" people. Probably somewhere between when they started cooking together ("it's just easier to shop this way") and the point where Kris stopped pretending they were gonna sleep in their own bed. Left to her own devices, Noelle will put on some terrible true crime documentary or eighties slasher flick, so Kris usually tries to steal the remote. Last week, they'd hidden it a little too well, and their TV had been stuck on the same channel since.
Sure, they could manually flick through the buttons to change the channel, but by the time they sit down with dinner, Kris spreading their legs across Noelle's lap in the way she'll complain about but never stop, neither of them actually want to get up. Tonight's entertainment is Sports eXtreme, an annual competition of mildly injurious sporting events that's somehow managed to stay on air for twenty three years, and despite themself, they're actually kind of into it.
"Dang. I thought Dess was like, the best skater in the world 'cause she could do an ollie," Noelle says, munching on a carrot stick. Their plates are set to the side, dinner finished, but that hasn't stopped her from snacking out of the open bag.
"It was a pretty cool ollie." Kris had been strictly forbidden from skateboarding after Dess's first attempt at teaching them had ended with two skinned, bloody knees. They'd started sniffling, which set Noelle off crying even harder, and Toriel had to be talked down from calling the hospital.
It didn't stop them, but it did mean they had to practice in secret on packed dirt paths, where the uneven ground and random scattering of pebbles and acorns lead to even more spills. Dess gave it up after a year or two, deciding that rollerblades (which Kris was pre-emptively banned from) were cooler, and that was the end of that.
"Oh, damn, look at her!" The skater reaches the top of the ramp, then twists her hips and does some crazy half-spin maneuver, grinding the underside of the board against the rim of the ramp until she jumps her board—Kris has no clue how that's possible—and lands in a crouch, already soaring down the other side.
They steal one of Noelle's carrots while she isn't looking and pop one end into their mouth, chewing on it like a cartoon rabbit. She pokes them in the ribs without taking her eyes off the screen.
"Rude. And not as sneaky as you think you are."
"And yet here I am, carrot in—oof." Lightning quick, she leans over and plants a hand on their chest, pushing them back against the couch, then pulls the half-chewed carrot stick out of their mouth.
"Gross. What if I have cooties."
"Pretty sure you're up on your shots," Noelle says through a mouthful of repatriated carrot. "And I've had worse."
The segment cuts to a post-performance interview. It was clearly filmed a bit after—the contestant has had some time to clean up, wipe the sweat off her face, and fix the worst of the helmet hair. Still, she's got that look in her eye: the endorphin rush you get from flying through the air, pushing yourself just a bit past reason to see if you can make it. Her grin is sharp, and she's still holding herself like she's ready for a fight as she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and slips the scrunchie from her wrist. Noelle leans over, resting her elbows on Kris's legs. For all that she complained about missing her rewatch of Reanimator III, she's not immune to a hot skater.
It's nice. The kind of nice that feels stolen, that years ago would've felt like a knife in their gut that no one could see. Even now, some part of them feels that to enjoy this is a betrayal of the price they paid—a price that was never theirs to pay.
But Kris has been living on stolen time for a while, now, and moments like this, whether they deserve them or not, aren't something they're interested in breaking just for the sake of it. The low drone of the TV, Noelle warm against them… tonight, they'll steal a little more.
So it's absently and without much thought that they admit, as the camera cuts back to a highlight reel showing off an 'Air Grab Nose Stall',
"Man, I had the biggest crush on Dess when we were kids."
Noelle chokes on a carrot.
"You WHAT?"
Maybe if they think really, really hard about it, they'll have one of their post-possession blackouts. Losing half an hour would hit the spot right now.
"Kris, she was like, six years older than us!" Noelle had spun to face them, knocking their legs off of her lap, insult added to injury. They hide their face in their hands, remain tragically conscious, and groan.
"I was eleven!" they protest. "She could skate and swear and she let me try one of her cigarettes once. It's not that weird."
"She was my sister!"
"Well she wasn't mine!" Kris finally raises their head. Hiding it wasn't going to fool anyone, but they hate how easily it shows when they were flustered. "It was just one of those dumb kid crushes. She was cool. Didn't treat me like a freak."
Noelle makes a face at that. "I'm pretty sure she called you a freak more than she used your name."
Kris shrugs.
"It felt different when she did it."
It had. In some ways, it was a mean thing to call a kid who could already tell they weren't going to grow up like the people around them. Dess said it anyways, and Kris had loved her for it.
For two whole years after the bonfire funeral, they hadn't talked about her. The one time her name was invoked wasn't about her, really; it had been the sharpest thing they had in reach to lash out with.
Then Noelle turned 19. Celebrating a birthday her sister would never see broke something in her, one last bit of hope she hadn't known she'd had. Kris had stayed up all night with her, forcing themself to speak through blurry eyes and a cracked throat. Stories about her. Little memories they'd secreted away. The Knight, when she'd asked. It had been a private bloodletting for two. They're still not sure if it helped, but they don't regret it.
They talk about her like she's an old friend, now. Someone who moved away, not a monument to grief sealed away behind barbed wire. It still hurt, but it was more like massaging a splinter: painful to touch, but easier once you had. It was better this way.
"I picked out the red horns, you know. Whole lineup of plastic kids toys and I went for those. Guess I kinda thought if I could be like her, then maybe…"
They don't finish. Don't need to, really.
"Hey. C'mere."
Noelle beckons them, but she's the one to scoot over on the couch and pull Kris close to her. They lean back, letting their head rest against her chest. Her fingers find their hair, stroking at first, then scratching behind their ear, just how they like it. It's getting tangly at the ends; they'll have to ask her to cut it again soon.
On the screen, the judge's panel starts to announce their results. Their skater—Robin Raleigh, apparently—is sitting in third, with a score of 71 out of 100. It doesn't seem right to Kris, but then, they hadn't seen the other contestants. Still, they think of the glow coming off her in that interview, the wink and grin she'd flashed the camera. How free she'd looked speeding towards the nadir, one hand on the tail of her board.
"I guess I get it," Noelle says. "I mean, if she wasn't my sister, I probably would've had a crush on her, too."
What.
"What," Kris says.
"What?"
"That's like. Way weirder?"
"What? No it's not. I said if she wasn't my sister," Noelle repeats slowly. "That's different."
"How is that different."
"I just said how? Come on, don't act like it's that crazy. I mean, didn't Susie kinda remind you of…" She trails off. Kris can practically hear the gears turning in her head. "Uh."
"No, no, hang on." They twist in her lap so they can look at her. "Tell me more about how normal it is."
"I mean,"
"That we both had a type, which just happens to be your sister,"
"Okay when you put it like that—"
On the screen, two monsters in suits run through a post-show wrap up while sponsorships scroll past on the chiron below. The volume is too low and the room's participants too distracted by each other to notice, but if were been listening, they would have heard about the promising young rookie who'd rocketed onto the scene. A third place finish in her first competition, with the kind of flourish you'd see in pros—and the screen shows Robin Raleigh, balancing on the knife's edge detente between gravity and momentum, the nose of her board to the sky and a wild grin on her face. Now that, they say, is a monster who's got a bright future ahead of her.