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Kris can't move.
The weight of the soul settles in their chest like an anchor as they stare out into the familiar shapes their living room has been reduced to. In the dark, they can make out the sleeping form of their mother in her chair (she’ll be sore in the morning), the dusty television on the coffee table to her right. Even without the moonlight filtering through the curtains, they'd know every inch of this room, having lived here all their life. In this house. In this town.
Susie's new, though. She's snoring on their couch with her snout tilted up into the air, not quite having fallen asleep on Kris's shoulder.
They blink the sleep out of their eyes, finding it difficult to breathe. Soon, they'll grit their teeth and find the strength to tear their heart from their chest and do what they've promised, but she's here now. Dead to the world as they procrastinate.
They think about Susie being the one to rip their heart out instead. She'd call it gnarly, maybe, while raking her claws across it, prodding clumsily in her attempts to be gentle. She isn't gentle, though, and they like that about her. She just does things. Not because she doesn't care, but because she cares too much, even when she's pretending she doesn't. She'll bend and break the world until it's better.
(It feels weird, to be so sappy about her. But she's sleeping. She won't hear.)
Kris aches to be like that, soul heavy in their chest. They think they might have hated her for it, before, her uncompromising freedom– but they don't know how they feel about it now. It's not hatred, whatever it is. They almost wish it were , because now it’s one of those complicated things that gets unfocused when you stare at it too long, so they tuck it away in the back of their mind. A rusty cage, somewhere else.
And they wonder (tiredly, uselessly) if she'd have enough of a soul for the both of them, if they just got close enough. If she'd fallen asleep with them tangled up small and weightless in her arms instead of this almost-touching, if they leaned into the weight of her so hard it hurt. If it'd work. Would that stop them? Would she share?
Not if she knew. She'd hate them if she knew about everything they've kept from her. She might just walk away, instead of tearing them down, and that’d be the worst of all. If she was just gone, quiet.
But while she's asleep, Kris can pretend for a minute– pretend that they're normal teenagers who stayed up late watching TV on a Friday night, and maybe tomorrow they'll get to say something to her over breakfast about how she could totally do the sound effects for kaiju movies because she practically roars in her sleep, and she'll grin (teeth dripping with syrup from the pancakes their mom made, saccharine), elbow them in the arm, rib back at them. Equal parts stupid and funny.
They'd wanted to laugh this morning, when she finally let go of their shirt and told them their choices didn't matter. It'd be nice if she knew them like that. She doesn't though, and they can't make her.
Kris feels like they could've known her their whole life.