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Killer knows that, for better or for worse, someone is going to die tonight. And if she has any luck at all, any luck, it won’t be Cross who does.
Her truck nearly skids off the side of the road and into the forest – Killer has to steady her grip on the steering wheel and make a sharp turn to avoid it, the rain battering down on her windshield and the road alike making that stunt a dangerous one.
Cross’s father lives in a nice house but a secluded one, meaning it’s forty-five minutes away from Killer’s family apartment in the city, with no goddamned guardrails on the road, and —
She’s too distracted. Were the stakes any less high, she might not be driving at all. She’s clearly not in the right mind, hell, she’s not even fully sober. But Killer doesn’t have a fucking choice in this, does she? It’s been half an hour since she’s last heard of Cross, and Killer knows it can take a lot less time than that for someone to lose their life.
In the passenger seat is Killer’s phone, screen still unlocked and glaring up at her. The app opened shows the last texts between her and Cross before radio silence, the brightness acting as a beacon in the dead of night. It’s one of those hidden apps that bypass parental controls, because of course XGaster wouldn’t let Cross any semblance of privacy if he could help it.
Killer risks a glance down at it, hoping, praying there’s any new messages from her girlfriend.
CrissCross 💞😘 - 9:18pm
I don't know what to do
He keeps banging on the door
He’s gonna kill me this time he's going to kill me
I don't want to die Killer
You - 9:19pm
cross breathe
please
im coming
its going to be okay
CrissCross 💞😘 - 9:19pm
I love you
I’m sorry I didn't say it before
You - 9:19pm
dont say that
im omw
cross?
cross answer me
babe???
cross?? please answer youre scaring me
love you
Zilch.
Killer snarls at nothing in particular and digs her nails into the steering wheel until she’s sure she’s going to chip one. The worthless little GPS that hangs off the dash of her car tells her she’s two minutes away from Cross’s place, yet it feels like an eternity until the road turns into the gravel of the driveway underneath her tires.
The tree-shaped car freshener dangles back and forth from her review mirror as the ride becomes bumpy, yet Killer’s focus remains intact like a cat fixated on the canary. She parks behind the two fancy cars in XGaster’s driveway, one white convertible and one black sportscar, and steels herself.
The cars in front of her are wastes of money and testaments to XGaster’s piggish need to nurture his public image, because in all the years she’s known Cross, Killer has never seen either of those cars in use. The real car is kept in the garage, these things are eye candy for eye candy’s sake. Killer might just slash the tires of them if she has the time, but XGaster might not notice for months with how little he fucking looks at them.
It compliments the house itself, though, which looks like it belongs in a fancy Florida neighborhood and not rural Maryland. It’s large, just as monochrome as the cars parked outside it, with countless windows that adorn each wall and three total floors, complete with balconies and all. The first floor alone has more square feet than Killer had ever seen in a residential building, though she’s only ever lived in apartments and group homes so that doesn’t say much on its own.
Still, it’s worthless extravagance. A needless display of wealth spent on a building meant to exude status and not much else. The idea is grotesque to think about for long.
It pisses her off. Alcohol always makes her furious at something.
She slams the door of her car and doesn’t bother to take her phone with her as she approaches the front door. She doesn’t try to walk in, not yet, nor does she dare knock. Instead, she peers through the windows. The sight she gets is obscured by the blinds but tells her all she needs to know.
XGaster is cornering Cross, who’s slumped over and sluggishly bleeding from a deep cut on her face. There’s broken glass on the floor – Killer quickly realizes she’s not the only one who’d been drinking that night. XGaster is screaming, she can hear it muffled even outside of the home, and she sees the way Cross flinches periodically as the man’s volume raises.
Relief, despite the scene unfolding in front of her, floods through Killer’s veins only because this means that Cross is alive. It’s not too late.
The relief is soon replaced with something colder as her line of sight flits from Cross’s face to XGaster’s, then to the handgun in his hind pocket.
Killer ducks away from the window before she can be caught and circles around to the back of the house, boots making squishing sounds as they stomp against wet grass. It takes so much longer than she’d like for her to circle back to the hind porch of the place, but she leaps onto the concrete slab of the patio quickly enough.
As she nearly trips over an in-ground firepit, Killer fishes in the back pocket of her black cargo pants for the spare key Cross had given her, back when they were fourteen and fifteen and Killer had convinced her to sneak out for the first time. Killer’s hair is wet as the rain beats down on her scalp.
The key fits in the lock of the home’s back door after she fumbles with it for way too long, but the house is so damn big that Killer’s certain it doesn’t register near the front where Cross and her rat father are. Killer’s steps are light despite the weight of her combat boots as she enters the building, moving as though she’s never left the darkness a day in her life. She steps only where the shadows cover her the most, creeping behind counters and peeking behind walls as she comes closer and closer to where her prey stands.
“—do you even see in that bitch?!”
…Killer is getting close. She passes by the kitchen, and then the dining room, and then the open doors of a lavish office room— she pauses, head slowly turning as she sees a shimmer of light reflect on something sharp from the corner of her vision.
Something icy rests in her arteries, pumped through the rest of her by her cold heart as she zeroes in on the twin blades of fabric scissors, perched on the edge of a low table barely inside the office room opposing her.
If Killer looked up, she’d see a wide photo frame of Cross and her family, complete with cousins and aunts and uncles, her brother and sister, and her father above them all, hung on the wall above the coffee table and adjacent to shelving. But Killer does not look up. She looks down, focused on the scissors that rest innocently on the wooden surface. They have golden, gilded handles with intricate patterns, and two sharp, silver blades that come to a needle-like point.
She nearly stumbles over her own feet as she grabs the scissors and holds them between her fingers. She catches herself, but only barely, and freezes for seconds and strains her ears to see if anyone noticed.
“I wasn’t going to, I promise! I was just– I wasn’t going to, please, Father–”
Nobody did. Killer continues stalking forward, each footstep careful and silent against the black-stained hardwood floor of the house. The experience is sobering. She rounds a corner, and it becomes much easier to see her surroundings as they’re illuminated in a dull light cast from the next room over.
“This family has a reputation, Sans! You had too much of an image to uphold to go behind my back and conspire like this. Do you have any idea what this could do to us!?”
“It wasn’t like that—!”
Killer tenses, freezing in place as the distinct sound of a slap echoes throughout the empty house. There are no carpets to line the floors, minimal wall art and few furniture pieces to absorb the noise – it rings like a wail in a cavern. Something vile curls in her gut, and Killer has to stop herself from trembling in rage.
She takes a deep breath and continues to shift within the shadows, each footstep surgically precise. She’s perfectly concealed from anyone’s line of sight as words get clearer and clearer, painting an ugly picture in her mind’s eye.
“I’ve had colleagues question my authority because I can’t even keep my own damn son under control! Do you realize how that looks?”
Killer’s expression doesn’t betray a fraction of her fury, it doesn’t betray a fraction of anything. When she finally turns to the main room – the foyer, Cross had called it once – she registers the light source as the result of a floor lamp that had been knocked over. Of course, that holds less priority than finally laying eyes on the silhouette of the girl she loved and the man who was going to kill her.
“You were going to leave the family,” XGaster sounds disgusted, like the very words he says are bile in his mouth to expel. Killer can hear, now, how his words slur. He’s still cornering Cross, but this time he’s grabbed her by the hair, holding her up against a wall so there’s nowhere she can run, forced to stare XGaster in the eyes and take the verbal beating. “You and that girl were talking about leaving.”
Killer’s nose wrinkles as though she’d smelt something nasty. XGaster never liked it when his playthings held games without him, and certainly not with rules he didn’t create. Is it Killer’s fault for begging Cross to find a way to talk with her? Could this have been prevented if Killer had just backed off like XGaster told her to months ago?
Killer stalks the man like a hunter would a deer in the woods, eyes sharp and fixated on her prey as she weaves silently in the dark of the house. Each step lets her see the display of brutish violence clearer and clearer, until even her piss-poor vision does nothing to conceal the terror on Cross’s face or the wrath in XGaster’s.
“I wasn’t—” Cross tries again, her voice shrill and afraid, but is cut off before she can even finish. Killer doesn’t think she’s managed to get a whole sentence out this entire argument.
“Don’t you fucking lie to me! I told you to stop talking to her, and you didn’t listen. Now look what she’s done to your head! You’re going out in public as a goddamn tranny, you know the weight our name carries and you drag it through the mud!” XGaster lifts Cross higher by the hair, to the point her feet no longer touch the ground and Cross cries out in pain. It hurts Killer just to look at, so she doesn’t.
“You think you can just fucking leave? Do you have any idea what that would do to me? The fucking embarrassment that would cause!? Answer me!”
Killer’s eyes bore into the back of XGaster’s head, and had she lived in a world with magic, she would have set him ablaze with the intensity of her stare. Wide-eyed, owlish, and predatory. Killer wants to watch him choke on his own blood, to gargle and writhe on the ground as she watches with vindication. She shifts the scissors in her hand, and prays he does not go for the gun in his back pocket when he escalates.
“I wasn’t thinking!” Cross cries, shaking her head even though her scalp must burn by now. “I won’t leave, I won’t– I promise, I’ll never speak to her again!”
XGaster lets go of Cross’s hair and she falls to the floor with a thud. The atmosphere changes in an instant as his grip goes from the hair on her head to wrap around her neck, fiery to ice-cold. Lifting Cross up, squeezing. “Do you take me for an idiot, Sans!?”
As she takes a step forward, Killer begins to count. Her hold on the fabric scissors tighten.
The reaction from Cross is instantaneous. She scrabbles to claw at XGaster’s hands wrapped tight around her neck. One. She makes these horrible crackling noises, wet as panic overtakes her. Her eyes are wide and she thrashes about like a wild animal caught in a snare, saliva pooling from the corners of her mouth. “I told you this would happen if you stepped out of line again. I fucking told you!”
XGaster’s thumbs are pressed in that divot right under the edge of her jaw, stopping the bloodflow from the arteries that rest there and filling Cross with a palpable, primal terror. His nails dig into the sides of her neck. Killer shifts the scissors so she’s holding them by the blade. Ten.
“I have other children who will fill your place in this family in an instant,” XGaster snarls – Killer doesn’t know if Cross can even hear him, she’s growing unresponsive save for the choked noises she makes as her father’s grip gets tighter around her neck. Her arms fall limply to her sides, as if the fight had been drained out of her. Fifteen. “You have never been a permanent fixture. And I will make sure that etched into your tombstone is the name I gave you, Sans.”
Cross’s eyes roll into the back of her head, and XGaster’s grip does not lessen in strength. He’s keeping her pinned to the wall, hand around her throat, aiming to slaughter. If Killer does not act now, Cross will die. Twenty.
Out of the darkness, the girl strikes.
She lunges after XGaster, and she’s shorter than him but more determined than she’s ever felt in her entire fucking life. She only has one shot, just the one, and she takes it with no thought or hesitation. One hand grips the back of XGaster’s suit, hoisting her up so she can bring her weapon up and pierce.
The scissors jam deep into the side of XGaster’s neck, Killer their holder. The man lets Cross go, dropping her to the floor, but Killer doesn’t reciprocate. She digs the scissors deeper, deeper, pushing them further into the flesh as she grinds the palm of her hand into the handle.
It’s only when XGaster makes this choked, garbled noise that she decides to pull the scissors out, letting herself leap back to the floor instead of dangling off Cross’s father. He doesn’t even scream when she does. He hardly makes any sound at all.
In the instant she removes the steel, there’s a geyser of blood that spurts violently from the gouge left behind. It sprays her like a sprinkler on overdrive, painting her face and hair and tanktop a near-black type of red. It spurts on the walls in pulses, staining the white paint and the black flooring beneath it.
XGaster’s home always did have a lackluster color palette. Killer takes a step back as the man crumples to the floor, thrashing and twitching before seconds later, he stills.
Killer stares. She stares down at XGaster’s unconscious – dead? – body, then looks at where Cross had fallen at XGaster’s release. The girl’s fingers twitch, eyes fluttering open, and Killer finally gets a good look at what XGaster had done to her.
On the left side of her face is this jagged, deep scar that cuts along her cheek and half of her nose bridge, and though it seems to have clotted well, the dried blood still covers the skin underneath it from where it’d pooled. Her neck is red and beginning to mottle with bruises, as is one of her eyes – Killer hadn’t been there to see that, but it wouldn’t be the first time Cross wound up with a black eye after an encounter with her father.
As the seconds go by, Cross begins to writhe and wheeze in place as she either comes-to or just gets enough air to function again, her hand raising to clutch her throat. Killer isn’t sure if she realizes what just happened, what Killer had done, and doesn’t dare bring it up herself. Precious seconds pass where the only noise is Killer’s heartbeat, Cross’s ragged breathing, and the faucet-like sound of blood spilling from XGaster’s neck as the geyser fades into a steady pour.
Eventually, Cross does look at Killer, but then she looks at her father, and something confused and frightened crosses her face. Her brows furrow, expression pinched, and Killer watches as she drags herself to XGaster’s slumped body. A dark red pools underneath the man’s limp form, and stains the knees of Cross’s pants as she shuffles closer. “Papa?”
Killer turns to look back at the scissors in her hand, the silver metal dyed crimson. XGaster is dead, she knows in that instant. Pinched between the slight divot between each blade of the scissors is a piece of flesh, as though it’d been caught in the crossfire and tugged out.
Her girlfriend doesn’t seem to have gotten the idea. Cross shakes the man’s shoulders weakly, voice hoarse and broken. “Papá, estoy aquí. Estoy aquí, papá. No hagas eso, ahora no…”
“Cross.” Killer speaks up, voice sharp as she finally lets her gaze flicker away from her weapon and to the woman she’d used it to protect. “We need to go.”
“He needs help,” Cross croaks, her eyes watery. She’s not doing anything to help XGaster, strangely enough – Killer knows she knows first aid, Cross had recounted her boy scout days many a time when patching Killer up in the past. If this is because Cross knows deep down it’ll be no use, or because her brain’s still sluggish from the blood it’d been deprived of when XGaster strangled her, Killer’s not sure.
Killer grips the scissors tighter in her hand. The metal digs into the skin of her palm with the force she carries them with by the blade. “He’s dead, Cross. He doesn’t need anything.”
“But he’s breathing–”
“Get your stuff.” Killer interrupts her, staring off into the distance, not very sure if she’s still alive on her feet. She feels as though she could pass out at any second, the adrenaline leaving her body and having her lightheaded. “We’re going. I have a place.”
It takes Cross five minutes to stand in the first place, and she looks like a newborn fawn when she stumbles up the stairs and to her room. Killer doesn’t follow her. If Cross were to call the police, that would be fine by her.
Blood drips from Killer’s weapon down onto the hardwood floor, a pattern of red spots. XGaster was as good as dead no matter what anyone did.
Slowly, she bends down and takes the pistol from XGaster’s hind pocket and holds it in her hand, staring blankly as she rises back straight. It’s heavy, but she’s never held a gun before so she’s not quite sure if that means anything. Whether it’s loaded or not is beyond her knowledge, but knowing the man, it probably is.
After a moment of hesitation, Killer goes down again to rifle through the man’s wallet and pulls out more cash than she’s seen in her whole life.
Dead men don’t need money, she tells herself, the dollars stained with red fingerprints as she pockets them. Four hundred and fifty seven dollars, just like that. Most of it’s in fifties and hundreds, but there’s a few twenties in the wallet too. She’s never held more than eighty bucks worth in her hands at once.
The least the dying bastard could do is give Cross a head start in whatever the fuck they were going to do after this. There’s no way either of them could stay in the city, no way either could stay in the state, not after this. Killer’s chest heaves with each breath, deep and ragged.
Cross comes back down shortly after, a bag slung over her shoulder with what’s likely just about everything from her room. She didn’t have many belongings to begin with, at least not many that Killer could see her wanting to bring. She nearly trips and falls twice down the stairs, still trembling in shock.
They look at each other, equally dead-eyed in their own right. Blood has begun to clump in Killer’s hair, and dry on her clothes. Cross hasn’t yet washed her own from her face.
They head towards Killer’s truck, and Cross climbs into the passenger seat after knocking Killer’s phone over. The gun is put in the glovebox, and the scissors are shoved into the cupholder as Killer tries to start the damn engine.
The truck pulls out of the driveway and it’s like nothing happened at all.
At first the drive is silent save for the sound of rain pitter-pattering on the windshield, and it scares Killer more than killing XGaster ever could have. It’s only after ten minutes that they’ve been on the road when Killer speaks up to tell Cross where they’re even going. She’s desperate to break the silence, but her words feel so much further away than they are, like they’re coming out of someone else’s mouth.
“We’re going to Maine.” Killer tells her in a higher voice than normal, strained and tense. “It won’t take longer than twelve hours. I’ve driven further.”
There’s a muffled buzz as her phone dings with a message from where it’s fallen underneath Cross’s seat.
“I have friends,” Killer continued. “Dust and Horror, they’re— they’re good people, I’ve known ‘em since I was little. We were in the home together, but they moved out together after graduation. They’ve got a place upstate we can go to.”
Killer knows she’s speaking to Cross, but it doesn’t feel like she’s doing anything with purpose right now. “Dust’s good with this stuff too, she’s– she’s had run-ins, you know? She can help us. She’s gonna help us figure this all out.”
“My dad is dead.” Cross’s voice cuts through Killer’s rambling, punctuated by a snap of thunder. If Killer wasn’t so focused on the road, and so suddenly paranoid about the idea of sirens materializing behind her and ruining fucking everything, she would have noticed by now that Cross is crying. Tears silently stream down her cheeks and dribble on her lap. She’s not buckled in yet.
“...I’ve got some whiskey in the back. I know it’s not your style but it’ll— it’ll help.” Killer grips the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grasp, rambling on and on as she quickly finds she can’t fucking shut up for even a second, not even now. “Horror’s eighteen, you know, but she looks a lot older ‘cause she’s got this– this scar, I guess? It’s from a house fire, or a– a car accident, I don’t remember– but the shops, yeah? The shops just let her buy whatever without carding her. There’s probably some wine at her place if that’s more your speed. I mean– I know you don’t drink, but it’ll probably help at least.”
“I want to go home. Killer, Kills, take me home, I want to go home.” Cross’s voice pitches higher, and she lets more and more tears fall, fat and warm down her face. Her chest heaves as she works herself up into hyperventilation. Killer has never seen her so weak. “I wanna go home–”
“Home’s gone, Cross.” Killer is still covered in XGaster’s blood. Like a wolf who’d just dug into a fresh carcass, pelt coated in a rich carmine that drips down onto the forest floor. Except the forest floor, in this case, is the seat of Killer’s car. Neither of them have bothered to clean themselves up.
Cross wails indecipherably into her hands. The car smells of iron and the vaguest hint of bourbon. Killer does not look her way, even though she yearns to hold Cross in her arms and let her cry her pretty little eyes out as they figure out what to do next.
She knows, deep down, that maybe she would never get to do so. Her driving now is frantic and unprepared, though not directionless. Frankly, she wouldn’t be surprised if after the shock faded, Cross would call the police on Killer. What happened was not something either of them could look past easily. It tears Killer out of the ballpark of a rebellious lover and throws her into one of a murderer, plain and simple.
Yet despite what’s at risk, Killer can’t find it in herself to feel even an ounce of regret, even as Cross’s heartbroken wails pierce her ears again and again. The fabric scissors glint up at her innocently from their place in her truck’s cupholder, still covered in a crusting scarlet.
If given a rifle and a range, she would have shot XGaster between the eyes for sport.