aiko's otter den

yellow as a real star - You are not a hero, yet here you are with a happy ending. Or, Rachel, and the aftermath with the monsters.

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4. IV

The hike up to the mansion would have left Rachel panting a few years ago, but track and field club has done her a world of good. Like it or not, she loves to run. She might as well make a career out of it.

Well, if she doesn’t go into the tower, anyway.

Kris watches her with a raised eyebrow behind their mass of matted hair. Rachel wishes for a comb. The grunge look makes them look miserable. But they don’t seem interested. They’re staring at her like she has something interesting going for her. That’s new.

“I thought you were like your friends.”

Rachel bites back a laugh. Her friends don’t have vibe scars all over them, or ribs that are still ginger to touch. Her friends find every excuse to stay out of the sun aside from impressing boys. It would be funny if that was something she was interested in herself.

Her friends don’t sit at the edge of a cave and doubt, while their little brother is close enough to touch but not to save.

“I like them for that reason,” she says instead.

They shrug. “If you say so, girl.”

Rachel shrugs back. “It’s like a pocket of being normal.”

“But you’re not normal,” says Kris.

They’re so matter of fact. If Asriel had said that, she would have bonked him. But the way they say is both matter-of-fact and wistful, hoarse voice dragging on the last syllable. They’re not normal either. They remind Rachel of the ragged kids she had stolen bread with, the ones who hoarded smoked jerky and knitted their own clothes with Arlene’s old fabrics. They’re not unloved, exactly, but she’s seen those kids around now that they’re outside of Mt Ebott. Some of them are happy, fulfilled, wave at her or don’t even recognize her.

Some are in alleys, still struggling even now. She’s even passed by a few graves. Rachel has never told Bam.

She’d been born in the mountain, in the underground caves. One of the hardest things to explain to the monsters was that a lot of humans inside hadn’t really wanted to leave. The outside was beautiful and terrible and terrifying.

Bam was also all of those things, so there wasn’t really a choice at all. The monsters had only somewhat understood. They thought of leaving as a good thing and a good thing alone, but that might be out of guilt.

“No,” she says. “I’m not.”

And maybe she never was and never could be. It was just hard compared to Bam, who was everything special.

They wade through the tall grass now, and slowly, she can see a home growing in the distance. It’s ivy grown and most of the windows are dark, but Rachel can feel it.

She can feel Arlene watching her.

Kris stops walking and gestures. They don’t gesture to any window, but Rachel looks up towards the second floor. One of the right side windows flickers with candlelight.

“She hates using electricity more than she has to.” Kris stuffs their hands in their pockets. “It was a bitch convincing her about electric heating.”

“She’s always been that way, even before this.” Rachel’s voice was quiet. “She thought washers were too loud and distracted from the nature around us. I don’t know if she’s wrong.”

“It’s nice out here,” Kris admits, starting the walk again. “But she’s insufferable with getting stuff done. Pays me back nice, though.”

“Sounds like her.” She was always rewarding when it suited her to look generous.

Kris hums as they reach the door. Plants grew haphazardly on the lawn, covered in flowers of many colors. Rachel glimpses a little garden at the side. Plenty for Arlene, who only vaguely needed sustenance. A blooming apple tree mocks her from the left.

Kris lifts the ornate knocker and knocks. It echoes. For a moment, Rachel wonders if the monsters have noticed she left the yard, if they’ve stopped discussing and arguing and gotten dinner on the table.

She hopes not honestly. She doesn’t know what they’ll do if both their ‘important humans’ are gone.

The door swings open, almost sliding off the hinges. Rachel jumps, remembering loud hinges and hiding in shadows. Kris just rolls their eyes and strolls inside.

She steps in after them and suppresses a wince at every creaking floorboard. She knows Arlene does this on purpose. She’s paranoid on a good day, even though her former friends trapped themselves in their own Garden of Eden. You can never be too careful, she would say. Any dog could learn to bite, my dear.

Including me, Rachel thinks with a new, venomous glee. I’ve learned to bite and I’ll chew off your nose. I’m not your little maid anymore. No one’s mother, no one’s caretaker. I’m me.

She tells herself this as Kris leads her into what has to be a parlor. Candles and a fireplace light up most of the room, save for a reading lamp.

Arlene sits, head propped up by her elbow, book in hand. She looks serene, untouched by time, down to the perfection of her clothes. She made everything look as if god made them for her alone, that the world turned for her without effort.

She even smiles with little inflection, but maybe thousands of years of immortality drained out most of your actual emotions, sanity not included. She lifts her eyes, golden and piercing and unlike Bam’s in almost every way and settles them against Kris’ own red ones. Rachel is now more grateful than ever that Chara and Bam had bound themselves together, because now she can only see Bam, monster and human, and not this.

“You’re late today, Kris,” she says. It’s not angry. She’s not even upset. She’s just curious. Just interested in why. What changes the routine? What new things have turned around her? Immortality makes you bored.

And acknowledging someone at once has never been Arlene’s method to do.

Rachel stands ramrod straight and resists the urge to throw up. Even her voice sounds the same, catapulting her to an orphanage of screaming and yelling and fighting for bread, of the softest touch to her head saying ‘she will do’—

Kris nods and shrugs off the backpack they’d never taken off in Toriel’s home. “Yeah. Was with her. She has nice friends. Noisy.”

“So I can tell.” Arlene slowly turns to look at her. “Hello again, Rachel.”

Rachel prays for her voice not to shake. “It’s been a while, Arlene-ssi.”

Arlene smiles. It’s beautiful, precise, perfect and slicing. “Our Violet left you, didn’t she?”

Rachel stifles down the bristling, the rage, the envy and annoyance that after all this years, she couldn’t just— “Bam has left yes.”

“Your pet name for her is cute.” Arlene closes her book and puts it away. “But yes, the door opened and you weren’t there to smuggle yourself in. No more fantastical dreams or ideas about that paradise for you then.”

Rachel doesn’t ball her hands into her fists. She hasn’t had those dreams in a long time, not since Asriel ripped her apart, not since finding an empty cave for the first time.

Maybe that’s why Bam’s absence doesn’t hurt her like it should. She’s already lost her boy once. That’s just growing up.

“Well,” Rachel says brightly. “Paradise doesn’t sound realistic after you left me to die a few times.”

More than a few. Displeasing the woman was the easiest thing in the world.

Arlene doesn’t seem perturbed. She never does, so getting angry with her was hopeless. She must have sounded like this. No wonder Bam left. “You’ve lost faith in me.”

“It’s easy,” Kris says knowingly. “You’re shite at being honest.”

Arlene laughs. Once she would have gotten angry. Maybe the fresh air was doing her good despite everything else. “I simply do not tell you what you want to hear, Kris. You ought to listen more.”

Kris says nothing to this. Sympathy stabs Rachel in the guts. There’s never an appropriate answer.

“I’m guessing you—” Arlene returns her intense look to Rachel again. “-Are here to chase after Violet, yes?”

Rachel debates breaking the woman’s nose and demanding her to stop misgendering the one person not in the room to defend themselves (this is what she does, she hurts people when they’re not here, when it’s safe, when they don’t even know someone is hurting them, this is what she does, this is what immortality does) “The monsters are going after Bam, or they want to try.”

“And what about you?” Arlene’s smile turns soft at the edges, harmless with the rounding of her eyes. “You have your stars now. You don’t need him anymore.”

She feels Kris’ red eyes on him. Rachel lets the words sink in her like stones. Because yes, she doesn’t need Bam anymore. Bam doesn’t need her anymore.

“I don’t, Arlene-ssi,” she agrees. “But he deserves better than a cave and a tower of enemies you made him.”

“Are you willing to die for him, then?”

Rachel smiles, all teeth and anger. She hears footfalls. Help is coming, maybe. “I don’t think I want anyone to die at all.”

The front doors fly off their hinges and Arlene tuts. “Such dramatic rats followed you here.”

“Rach, doll,” says Sans in the softest, most pleasant voice she’s ever heard. “You should step oh, a bitty bit over.”

Laser heat warms by her ear, but Rachel doesn’t move. She knows better.

Arlene laughs. And the mansion trembles. “Such a rude motley crew you bring, oh Mountain King and Hellfire Queen.”

Asgore doesn’t enter the room at first. For a moment, hysterically, Rachel thinks he won’t be able to fit. Then he ducks inside, dressed in armor and a familiar red trident burning in his hands.

“We could never take many chances with you, little witch.”

Arlene’s smile turns sweet and warm. “No, you couldn’t.”

Ah. Of course. She’d forgotten. Arlene had sealed the monsters and then just never let them out.

God, she is just like Arlene. She is just like her.

No wonder she doesn’t want to see Bam again.

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