Against the Grain (WIP)

A shadow skulked along the floor of the Dreemurr kitchen, hugging the counter and ducking under the silvery light beaming through the window. With a sure foot, the teenage-boy-shaped apparition crept undaunted through a minefield of creaky boards. When it reached its destination, the fridge, it pried open the door and took inventory.

Kris counted a pair of untouched drumsticks from yesterday's dinner, a third of a green bean casserole that even Toriel had grown tired of, and one stray slice of apple cinnamon pie. Perfect. That would be more than enough.

With practiced ease, he bagged and wrapped the leftover loot, then glided over to the bathroom.

He was getting good at the sneaking thing, he thought. He was shaping up into quite a burglar. A burglar who only ever stole things he was allowed to take, maybe, but a burglar all the same.

The G-rated rogue quietly flipped on the light switch and turned to the mirror.

It was definitely him.

His hair sat uncombed but generally neat on top of his head. His favorite jacket, a mossy green number that hung down past his waist, looked as nice as ever. He couldn't spot a single stain or speck of food on his clothes, and his acne was mercifully absent.

In Kris' humble opinion, he looked pretty good. Not that he was trying to, of course. He wasn't trying to impress anyone. Not even remotely, he was sure.

The good-looking boy who didn't care about looking good flicked the lights off and took stock on his way upstairs.

He had his jacket, the goods, and his phone. He looked good, just sheerly by coincidence. And he smelled, as a quick sniff under his arm confirmed, totally fine.

He couldn't get more ready than that.

Kris closed his room door behind him and braced himself as he made his way to the window.

Sneaking around the kitchen like a Solid Steel Cog character was just for fun, but passing through the window was serious. Probably the most serious part of the entire trip he was about to embark. He'd be neck deep in the Gospel of The Angel for weeks if Mom caught him sneaking out. Especially if she caught wind of what he was planning to do.

After a few seconds of psyching himself up, Kris gave the frame a heave. It slid up carefully, quietly, not offering even the most muted creak. Success!

Kris offered the window a faint smile. Maybe the old fogey knew what was on the line if it blew his cover.

Or maybe he was just getting good at sneaking out.

Kris poked his upper body out of the window and reached down until his hand grasped oak. Following in the footsteps of half of the teenagers in Hometown, Kris climbed out onto the house's old lattice and slid down. As draconian as she could be with regards to her children, it baffled Kris that Toriel never noticed what a liability that thing was. Her oversight was Kris' opportunity, though.

Finally in the clear, the boy bounded his way around the side of the house… And then winced when he heard the crunching of leaves. Even in the dim light of the half moon, Kris could see that yard was lightly dusted in yellow and orange. Dry, crispy, crunchy yellow and orange.

Shit.

He had forgotten that fall had begun in earnest just recently. Not wanting to risk failure in the home stretch, Kris plotted a path through the insidious leaves and made it to the driveway unscathed.

The boy followed the blacktop out on the street, and around halfway to Catti's house he finally allowed himself the pleasure of crunching leaves underfoot.

With thoughts of imminent bible verses finally out of the fore, Kris' mind finally registered how great the night was. It was perfect outside. Crisp and chilly and ever so slightly breezy. His nice outerwear would seem like a practicality and not an attempt to look cool. And it definitely was just meant to keep warm, he assured himself.

Halfway through his trek, the smell hit him. The familiar autumn scent of old wood and dead leaves wafted on the breeze. Although the season had only just begun, the help must have started mulching leaves on the Holiday estate.

That family had always run a tight ship on leaf disposal, as if annihilating any signs of autumn would will the Christmas season into coming faster. Kris wondered if the hospital staff let Rudy get enough fresh air to smell the fruits of the arboreal massacre taking place even without him to lead it. He'd probably get a kick out of it.

Kris paused as he neared the big white building that was just on his mind. This street held one last obstacle, in theory at least. He'd never had a run in with the whirlwind of suplexes and handcuffs at this hour, but he always checked just in case. Undyne was almost desperate for crime to crack down on, and a teen breaking curfew would surely be more than enough to draw her ire.

Kris hugged the treeline and sidled over to the side of the hospital. Carefully, he peeked down at the police station, which sat idle and quiet with its blinds drawn closed. For good measure, he cast a glance at the librarby, which seemed similarly deserted. It appeared there were no terrifying fish monsters to rear naked choke him into submission.

He was all clear, then. With that last worry off of his mind, Kris threw caution to the wind and dashed down the street. Leaves crunched and crackled and kicked up behind him, and the cool of the night bit deeper as he ran, but he didn't care.

Not that he cared about where he was going, though. It was totally casual. He was nonchalant about it. It didn't matter one way or the other how fast he got there.

He tore past the church at world record pace. On a lesser night his lungs might be burning, but the chill in the air kept his chest cool. He hopped the curb and dashed past the sidewalk, onto the unmarked trail. The leaves were actually thick here, and the deathrattles of the leaves began to echo as he pressed deeper into the woods.

Kris might have been unnerved, had he not been so overwhelmed with the power of just having a passing interest in what was ahead, at most.

He was getting close.

He veered to the left when he saw the mound which hid the doors, and slid to a stop in a way that probably looked cool.

His breath seemed to go with his momentum. He sucked in a lungful of the cold night as he began to scan the little clearing around the hill.

This was the spot. He was here. But he didn't see any sign of her.

His mind picked up where his legs left off.

He hoped he hadn't kept her waiting too long. Had he taken too long tiptoeing around leaves in the yard? Shit.

But it definitely didn't matter anyway, he reminded himself. He wasn't going to be crushed at all if he missed-

A thunderous clang of something striking metal dispelled his completely genuine aloof thoughts. The startled boy nearly jumped out of his skin. A thousand awful images of whatever lurked behind those creepy doors flashed through his mind.

He had nowhere to go but back, though. He braced for the worst.

The boy bolted around and… relaxed when he recognized the pair of dimly glowing, half-lidded yellow eyes staring at him.

"Took ya long enough, slowpoke," said the terrifying monster through a bite of pizza. "Kept me waiting all night."

Kris let out a much deeper breath than he expected, as he walked over to her.

As he got closer and his eyes adjusted to the dark, he felt like an idiot for not turning around sooner. Susie was a hard person to not see, and he had set out with the explicit purpose of seeing her.

Not like in the romantic sense though. This was not a date. No one ever called having dinner out in the woods a date.

"Are you thinking about weird shit again?"

Kris snapped out of the weird shit he was thinking about and shook his head. He apologized for making her wait, as he dropped his loot off in the pile.

Looks like she brought another pizza, and… flowers?

"Ah, don't worry about it," she waved a dismissive claw from her place against the steel door. "I was just messing with ya. If anything you're early."

Kris flopped down unceremoniously a few feet in front of her, letting the blanket of leaves break his fall.

He had thought he was really hauling ass there, for a minute. He probably was earlier than usual.

He wasn't sure about "early", though. Now that he was actually there, he could admit, at least in his mind, that he didn't think it was possible to show up to one of their not-dates too soon.

"Whoa," Susie crooned, brandishing a turkey leg and giving it a quick sniff. "This is some primo stuff, dude."

Kris nodded. It was primo. The bird had made for a great meal. One that even he, a boy of modest appetite, had torn into wholeheartedly. With only two mouths in the house, though, neither of which had a taste for dark meat, the drumsticks had managed to survive the slaughter. Until now.

Kris apologized as Susie licked her lips. He had only just realized he forgot to heat anything up.

Susie waved his concerns away. "It's fine, man," she told him. "That kind of thing doesn't bother me at all."

As if to demonstrate, she snapped the leg up, bone and all, with all the grace and finesse of a hungry crocodile. The crunching of bone and tearing of flesh joined the soft rustle of leaves on the wind.

With her focus diverted, Kris allowed himself the tiniest smile. Over the course of ten definitely-not-dates, counting this one, he had grown fond of the ravenous zeal with which she ate his offerings. The genuine, unrestrained joy his companion displayed when dispatching Toriel's cooking was always contagious.

Eventually, the sounds of ripping and tearing died down, replaced with a contented burp.

Kris put his stoic face back on just in time for a pair of yellow eyes to catch his.

"Did you uh, want this other one?"

Kris shook his head, and beckoned her to go on. Without a second's hesitation, the hungry dragon pounced on the unsuspecting appendage, tossing it airborne and catching it in her waiting maw.

Nice, he told her.

"'Anks," she mumbled, offering a thumbs up in between crunches.

While Susie sent the poor bird leg off to meet its twin, Kris crawled over to the pizza. In her infinite patience, Susie had attended to half of the large mushroom and pepperoni affair already. Not that he minded, though. That left plenty for him.

Kris grabbed a pair of slices, and started to crawl back to his spot. On the way, though, he caught a good look at the flowers.

He estimated they were about two dozen yellow, teal, and golden daffodils. And they'd seen better days. Their stems were bent in a number of places, and it was obvious they'd been without water for days. Kris knew where they had come from, originally, but he wondered where Susie had gotten them.

His father gave the things away like cheap- no, like free cigars, but he wouldn't hand out flowers in that shape.

She didn't like questions about where things came from, though. So he wouldn't ask.

Kris swallowed the thought with a slice of pizza. It was a little stale, and fairly cold, but still good. Very good, even. The taste and the texture had become so familiar to him he'd almost started to prefer his pizza slightly aged instead of fresh.

These impromptu potlucks had started with just slightly stale pizza, after all.

Susie had been the one to pitch the idea, after yet another failed attempt to head back to the Dark World. Maybe they wouldn't be seeing their new friends any time soon, she had figured, but they could still hang out. If he wanted to.

And he wanted to.

She had offered only two qualifiers, before the first secret pizza woods dinner. That it was NOT a date, and that he had better not get any funny ideas. Thus far, he had been very good about not calling their meetings dates. He'd done his best to quash any weird thoughts, too, but that was much harder.

But she'd never know if he kept his mouth shut. And if Kris had to make a list of all of his skills, keeping his mouth shut would most likely sit right at the top. Burglary was gaining, though.

A pair of snaps caught his attention, and he looked over.

"Yo, Earth to numbnuts," Susie called. Kris knew he shouldn't answer to "numbnuts" but did anyway. When she saw she had his attention, she pointed at the foil cube of casserole. "What the hell is this?"

It was…

What the hell WAS green bean casserole, anyway? It was a better question than Susie probably realized.

It was like green beans, he finally told her, but with mush added to them, and covered in little crunchy things. And it wasn't as bad as it looked, he promised.

Susie had tuned out after beans. Possibly after green.

"Eh, food's food, I guess."

A plum little appendage darted out from between rows of jagged yellow to test the soggy meal. And then again, this time carrying a little of the stuff back with it.

Even Susie wouldn't just huck the entire square of foil into her mouth, it seemed.

Kris silently thanked his hair for hiding his staring eyes. Susie didn't seem to mind when he spaced out or his gaze lingered a while, but staring intently at her tongue flicking away morsels of food might be a bit much.

He forced himself to take another bite of pizza to seem busy.

Before he had finished his first slice, Susie set down the depleted foil.

"Hey, that wasn't bad at all," she told him.

He nodded. As awful as it could look, casserole was good in small doses. Even a meat lover like Susie could appreciate it, it seemed. If Kris was ever stupid enough to tell Toriel what he was doing, he was sure she'd be flattered by that.

Kris looked up in time to see Susie unwrap the pie. A grin spread across her face as she gave it a sniff.

Apple cinnamon, he confirmed, before she could say anything.

"Hell yeah," she said, her smile even creeping into her voice. "You know apple is the best flavor, right?"

Kris nodded. Butterscotch was the best flavor, but he let it slide. He didn't want to ruin the moment. Every time he brought pie, it ended up being his favorite part of the night.

Susie carefully peeled back the pie's dragon-proof aluminum armor, and gingerly brought the doomed pastry to her muzzle.

Slowly, deliberately she inched the sole survivor of its tin into her mouth, finally biting down on the tip.

Kris listened in close, and caught the happy little grunt she made when she ate something she really liked. The one that he'd never point out because he didn't want her to stop doing it.

As she took bite after tiny bite Kris had to turn away to hide his grin.

The mighty dragon who could eat faces and turkey legs in one grievous bite unconsciously wiggled her feet as she savored every nibble of pie.

It was almost too much for him to bear.

All too soon though, she reached the crust, which she snapped down without ceremony. The little kicks died with the pie, and after licking her claws clean Susie looked up over at him.

"What are you doing, weirdo?"

Kris shook the lingering mirth from his face and told her it was nothing.

She didn't seem to buy it, but she wasn't going to press anything. She was in as good a mood as he was, at least.

She let him take a couple of bites of pizza before she spoke up again.

"You sure your mom doesn't mind all that stuff going missing?"

Kris shook his head. If anything, Toriel was happy that her other son had finally come into a monster-sized appetite, he reckoned.

Susie didn't seem satisfied with the answer. She met his eyes, but looked like she was searching for something.

"Well still, I uh…" she trailed off for a moment, trying to place something in her mind.

"Sometime I'm gonna pay you back for all this nice food you always bring," she told him, her voice overladen with confidence. "Alright?"

It was Kris' turn to think of what he had to say, as he met an expectant stare.

She had always thanked him for bringing food. Usually. Always after he had brought pie. Something seemed off tonight, though, and he couldn't put his finger on it.

He decided to go with the first thing that came to mind.

She didn't have to pay him back, he told her. He didn't mind sharing food, and her bringing him pizza made them even, anyway.

He left out the part about watching her eat making him feel warm inside.

She glanced away.

"Oh, good," she told him. She sounded deflated for someone who had just learned they didn't owe their friend anything. "That's cool that we're even, then."

As Susie turned to lay down, Kris got a very strong impression that it was not cool. But he had no idea where he had gone wrong.

A flicker of that old feeling flared up in his chest.

He didn't know what to say to break a silence that was growing awkward by the second.

Normally their after-meal silences were pleasant. They'd sit and look at the stars and just enjoy each other's company. It was one of the things Kris usually liked most about their not-dates.

Spending time with someone who didn't mind just sitting there with him, not pressuring him to talk, was a rare luxury. He'd only ever really done it with one other person.

Was prying into whatever had just happened the way to go? Probably not. Susie has always been pretty hostile to prying.

Small-talk, then. That was how people usually dealt with awkward silences. But what the hell should he say?

That old feeling was sparking in earnest now.

Kris clenched a fist on the ground and winced as he crushed a leaf. His fist relaxed.

What did she think of Fall blowing in so suddenly, he asked.

Weather was lame as hell but it was something.

"I like it," she answered, with what sounded like relief in her voice. "The leaves make the ground really comfortable."

"For when I decide to go outside," she added, after a moment. "And I'm not really into the cold, but there ain't much to do about that."

The feeling fizzled in Kris' chest, replaced with relief of his own. It seemed like she had wanted to move past whatever had gone wrong, too. Which means he couldn't have messed up too bad.

"What about you?" she asked, after a few more moments of precious silence.

Kris allowed himself to lay back and consider his answer for a moment.

He had nearly shit himself crunching leaves outside Toriel's window, he admitted. But overall he liked the fall. The leaves were pretty. He was in for twice as much raking this year, he realized. But he could deal with it.

Susie seemed satisfied with his response.

He heard rustling, and looked up to see her finally making herself comfortable on the vast yellow blanket, too.

The dragon whelp propped one leg on top of the other and gazed up at the stars, while the master burglar stole a glance at her from under his hair.

She was wearing what he gathered to be her favorite outfit. He wondered if she wouldn't do better to wear jeans without holes if the cold bothered her so much. But the jacket probably balanced it out. It looked snug. Maybe not as snug as the amazing one he was wearing, but snug enough to keep somebody warm.

Susie shifted a bit, and Kris saw what he was hoping to see. She was doing it, again. Glowing, just a little.

When the sky was clear and the moon was big enough, her scales would reflect the light, giving her the faintest little glimmer in the dark. The dull mauve glow was fragile, and only ever held if she was still, which made it all the more precious.

Seeing that purple aura around her, with a thousand tiny little glimmering moons on her scales made her look pretty in a way that she would definitely say was gay if he ever told her. So he kept it a secret.

He wished he had a camera, though. He hoped that didn't make him a weirdo.

"Hey weirdo," she called, extinguishing her glow by turning towards him, "You ever think about the future? Like, what you want to do or where you want to go?"

The question caught him off guard in multiple ways. He scratched his head, and gave it some thought.

She was willing to give him time, though. After just a moment she was back to stargazing, kicking her leg all the while.

Kris really didn't know what to say, so he went with what felt natural.

No, he told her, after a moment's pause. He didn't think much of the future. He didn't know what he wanted to do, either. After another bit of silence, he admitted that he did want to leave town though. He wanted to go somewhere else, maybe another town or even a city, where nobody knew who he was. He thought that would be nice.

His companion nodded along as he spoke. After giving her a minute to digest, he asked her the same thing.

The dragon scratched the back of her head.

"That was kind of… exactly what I was going to say, actually," she said, fixing her eyes on him. "You and I kind of seem to be on the same page, there."

Kris nodded. He didn't really know what to say in this situation. He didn't even want to say it was cool. That felt like it'd cheapen things. So he just lay there. Susie seemed to be thinking the same way.

He glanced over at the pizza box and noticed the flowers. Those flowers still seemed strange to him. And now seemed like the best time that night to ask about them.

What was with the flowers, he asked flatly. Feeling cheeky, he wondered if they were for him?

"Huh? Nah dude, they were for dessert," she answered, rising to a sitting position. "I mean, help yourself though. Just save me the gold ones. Those are the best."

Her answer just raised more questions. Dessert as in eating? She ate flowers? Dragons can eat flowers?

"Dragons can eat whatever they want, man," she told him, a defensive edge creeping into her voice. "And what's wrong with eating flowers? They're just plants."

Kris sputtered, trying to think of a rebuttal. You couldn't just eat flowers!

"Well if you suck, maybe you can't," she chuckled, the edge replaced by something playful.

At this point Susie had grabbed the tawdry bouquet and begun arranging them by color. Or, flavor, from her perspective, Kris realized. He hopped onto his feet and walked over to her.

She knew flowers could be poisonous, right?

"What? No way," she said, looking at him as if he had told her the sky was green. "If flowers were poison I'd be dead by now."

It's true, he went on.

 He told her about the time Asgore had tried growing a little patch of the very same golden daffodils she was eyeing in the backyard. He recalled how he and Asriel had gone out to play, and an ill-positioned wrestling match had sent them sprawling into the things. He told her about the hives and the itching, and the welts.

He stopped just short of Toriel having to scrub him with that awful dehydrating soap every night. He had some measure of restraint.

"Well that sucks, dude, but that doesn't sound like the flowers' fault," she told him.

Kris could only quirk his head in response.

"See," she went on, wagging a playful finger at him "You made the rookie mistake of having skin. If you had gone for scales, you'd have been fine."

With that, she chomped down on the heads of the golden flowers she'd isolated, casting their poor battered stems down onto the leaves.

Kris shuddered, and then shrugged. It was out of his hands, now. If she got gross internal hives she'd better not go crying to him. Of course, she was a monster, and a tough one at that. She'd probably be fine. It just seemed sacrilegious to a florist's son to just EAT the things.

That last comment of hers stuck with him, too.

There was nothing wrong with skin, he informed her. Skin was great.

"Well what's so great about it?" she jabbed. "You can't even touch flowers without it getting all gnarly and gross."

Kris had to concede that point for a moment. But skin was…

He paused, realizing he was woefully underprepared to defend the concept of skin to someone without it, even playfully.

"I'm just messing with you, skinlord," she told him after a moment. "You can have skin if you want. I know it's not really a choice."

Kris nodded, glad he was out of the hot seat for defending the honor of skin.

As she trudged back to her place by the steel doors, Susie offered him a bite of the remaining two bouquets. He politely declined.

With his right to have skin and her right to eat flowers firmly established, silence overtook the two teens once again.

Kris was still thinking of their conversation, though.

What was having scales like, he wondered aloud after a moment.

"Huh? What do you mean?" Susie answered. "That's a big question."

Kris sat for a moment and started thinking of specifics.

What did it feel like to be covered in scales, he mused. Were they hard? Did it ever get uncomfortable? Did they get caught on stuff? Did-

"Whoa, slow down there," she shot. "Give me a second now."

Kris happily obliged.

"So, I don't know what you mean by hard," she told him. "They just feel normal to me. Sometimes they get all cracked and shitty and dead. Those ones feel hard and uncomfortable, and you've gotta pull them out which sucks. But normal scales don't feel like anything at all."

She chuckled, after another pause. "As for getting caught on stuff, that really only happens if you're a hatchling or a dumbass. They've got..." she stopped, and patted the spot next to her.

"Hell, just come over here. It's hard to explain."

Kris had an idea of where this was going. He was suddenly very glad he had asked about scales and flowers.

As he approached, Susie slipped her right arm out of her jacket.

He knew it.

Carefully, Kris sat down beside Susie, and waited with bated breath.

When he was settled, and she knew he was watching, she grabbed her exposed arm with her other hand.

"Alright now watch."

He had never watched something so intently in his life.

She slid her hand down, smoothly gliding it across her forearm, then her wrist, all the way until her hands were both clasped.

"See, they've got like a… pattern you know a… what's the word?"

A grain, he offered.

"Yeah that. They've got a grain. And when you go with it, they're super smooth and nice and everybody's having a good time. But-"

She started to slide her hand back up, this time encountering resistance. Scales clacked and scratched and turned upward in a way that looked painful to Kris.

"When you go the other way, they get all snagged and shitty and they cut stuff. They're really sharp. It sorta blows."

It certainly looked like a bad time to Kris.

"So there," she told him, smoothing out her ruffled scales. "That's what having scales is like."

Kris nodded. It seemed cool, as long as you remembered the grain, he opined.

"Yeah, it is pretty cool," she replied. "Cooler than skin, for sure."

Kris nodded again. He would have conceded that from the start, he admitted to himself. Skin doesn't reflect moonlight and make you look like an angel at night.

"Do you want to try?" she offered quietly. "Since you keep staring."

Kris' cheeks burned. His hair didn't really help if he had his head pointed at her arm this entire time, did it?

But he did want to try. And she did offer. So he admitted as much.

"Well, go on then."

If had already embarrassed himself he might as well get to pet a dragon out of the equation.

He could feel her eyes on him as he reached out, ever so cautiously, towards her exposed arm. After an eternity of inching, the pads of his fingers finally made contact.

Scales really weren't that hard, he determined almost immediately. They were cold, though, with only a vague warmth underneath, like the exterior of a jacket. Feeling more comfortable now that contact had been made, Kris wrapped a hand around her bicep, just after where her t-shirt ended.

His hand couldn't quite close around it. In a way that he would like to imagine was unconscious, he gave her arm a little squeeze. Bigger than him, he already knew. Maybe bigger than Asriel, too. Dragons were truly something else.

Somewhere above him a throat was cleared. He looked up through his trusty visor to see an expectant Susie, blushing about as hard as he was.

Right, he was feeling what scales were like. Not copping a feel on his platonic friend who he wasn't dating.

Slowly, as slowly as he could get away with, Kris slid his hand downward. She was right, they were remarkably smooth and almost slick to the touch when he moved with them.

His grip had to loosen a little as he reached her elbow. He thought he felt a patch where some scales were missing on her upper forearm, but he dare not stop to ask. He kept inching downwards, running out of arm faster than he would have liked.

Before he knew it, his hand had settled around her wrist.

His face was burning. He should let go now. He knew it. But he let his hand linger there for a second. And then several seconds.

As the number of seconds he lingered grew, it almost seemed like it'd be more awkward to move at that point than to stay.

Susie had long since gone quiet.

He cast a cautious glance over to her and saw that her face was on fire too. He wasn't sure what her mouth was doing, whether she was smiling or frowning or both somehow. From the front, Susie's facial expressions were very hard to read.

The wrist he held tensed, and he heard her attempt to say something that died on her lips.

The feeling flickered again, as Kris resolved to let go and take this awkwardness on the chin. It was going to-

"If you're gonna hold my hand, just do it already!" she shouted at him, easily making the loudest noise he'd heard all night.

He wasn't sure what percentage of his shock came from the message and what came from the volume but he jumped all the same. He didn't release his grip, though. If anything he held tighter.

After a second at most, Susie yanked her arm free, and before he could mourn its loss she snatched up his hand in hers. Her grip was tight and her hand was much warmer than her arm had been. The warmth was spreading, actually.

"God!" she huffed, "Acted like that was the hardest fucking thing on Earth…"

Kris appreciated the reminder that he was on Earth.

Surprise, pleasure, fear, warmth and a thousand of their peers spun widly inside his head. He felt a little unsteady and was grateful he was sitting against a giant door. He doubted he'd have been upright otherwise.

He slapped his free hand against the mass of steel behind him. The clang and the pain woke him up and cleared his mind just a little.

"Kris?"

He squeezed Susie's hand. It was real. It was warm. Very warm. His hand hurt.

"Hello?"

Kris shook his head again and turned to her. She was smiling, but cautiously, and blushing so hard her face was nearly plum. He must have been smiling too, he realized.

He needed a minute, he explained when he remembered how to talk. He was processing a lot of things. And he just needed a minute or two to think.

Susie's smile seemed a little less cautious after she nodded. This time she squeezed his hand. It helped. His hand still hurt.

He had wanted to grab her hand. But he took too long to do it. So she did it for him. Which meant that she had wanted that the entire time? He wasn't sure. He thought that was right, but his head was still spinning.

A little slower now, but still spinning.

Working from the assumption that she had wanted to hold his hand the entire time, that must have been what she got annoyed about earlier.

The flowers probably came from Alphys' trashcans. Think about that later.

If she had the same kind of interest in him as he did in her, and this was not a date, and she said something about paying him back for food then… A clear course of action appeared in front of Kris.

One that seemed like it had a zero percent chance of completely ruining his only friendship with someone who didn't live in a magical alternate dimension.

"Hey, uh, Kris…"

What great timing. Kris shook the last little bit of mental grog off of his mind, and flipped his hair out of his eyes as he did it.

Susie almost looked surprised to see them. And concerned.

Without a quake or a quiver or the faintest hint of any irony, Kris looked directly into his totally platonic friend's eyes and asked if she'd like to go on a date with him. A date-date, which they would actually call a date. Because it was understood that it-

"Yes, I'll go! Jeez!" she sputtered, her expression melting into a big smile. "That's kind of what I was trying to get at earlier, dummy."

He knew it.

"But Kris your uh…" The concerned look was back. "Your hand is uh… Something's weird about it."

He grasped her hand again and winced.

He was coming off of cloud nine and his adrenaline was dying down. And it really hurt now.

Cautiously, regretfully, he peeled his hand away from hers. Truly peeled, because they were loosely stuck together.

He flinched just a little at the dark, coppery crimson as he brought it up to his face. His palm, index and middle fingers were gooey with thick, half-clotted blood. It hadn't run very far, stopping at his wrist. And it wasn't dripping. The cut wasn't serious, he determined.

The grain. Dragons have sharp scales. He felt bad for fucking up the only rule of her scale demonstration.

But he found it hard to care about a flesh wound, even if it did hurt. He had a date.

"What is this stuff, Kris?"

Blood, he explained. Sometimes it came out of people with skin. Nothing to worry about.

"Are you okay, though? Isn't it, like, bad to lose blood?"

He nodded his head, but explained he was good. Very good. He had a date coming up in fact. But he should go home.

"Well, let me walk you there," she commanded, but quickly added "Or at least to the edge of the woods. I know that trail is creepy as shit at night and you seem kinda out of it right now. No offense."

Kris didn't take any offense. He was a little out of it, probably. And he would like to not have to walk the forest trail alone. Especially if he was not alone with her.

Kris picked up the spent foil with his free hand, putting the wads in his pockets while Susie grabbed the pizza box. Before they left, Kris peeled off the bandage he wore over an old scrape on his ankle and slapped it over where he thought his hand was cut.

He knew he wouldn't pass out or anything, but he didn't want to lose any more blood than necessary. It was just good practice.

The walk passed silently, with the apparent couple exchanging smiles, at first. Halfway to town, though, Kris had the bright idea to offer his free hand, which Susie accepted.

Holding hands didn't cause a cacophonous emotional epiphany the second time, instead making him feel just one. He hoped it continued to work like that.

The well-adjusted lovebirds stopped when they reached the sidewalk. Reluctantly, they released hands.

"Goodnight," the dragon offered, shuffling her feet slightly, "And, uh, sorry about your hand."

Kris shook his head after bidding her goodnight. It wasn't her fault he got confused about the whole scale grain thing. It was so confusing.

She chuckled. "Yeah, it's hard to wrap your head around it when you're a fleshy, I'm sure."

Two steps into going their separate ways, she called out "Wait, hold on there, Casanova. We never said what day and time we're doing this date thing."

Kris froze in his tracks. Right, you were supposed to plan these things. He settled off the first thing that came to mind: the diner on Sunday at six.

That'd be two nights from then, plenty of time to get ready.

Susie shrugged. "Sure, sounds good to me. Guess I'll see you then."

Kris nodded, and the pair bid each other goodnight for real.

Despite nursing an injury and staying up half of the night, Kris practically sailed home on a burst of elated energy. The master burglar threw caution to the wind, sprinting through the yard and practically flying up the lattice.

He'd have to go back in the morning and make sure there were no blood stains. But that could wait. Everything could wait.

Except for taking care of his hand, which he attended to as fast as he ever had. While cleaning he even discovered a little surprise: one shiny, sharp little purple diamond. No, not quite a diamond, he realized, looking closer. It had a little chip missing at the tip of the soft side. A heart, he decided. A fitting prize for a wound.

Clutching his new souvenir carefully, Kris collapsed onto his bed, grinning like he hadn't in years. That old feeling in his chest had inverted, somehow.

As the boy smiled himself to sleep, he found himself wishing his brother were there for a new reason. He had a date.