UnderAsriel

1 - Rabbit Hole

Kel was a failure.

True, she didn't steal money or break windows or run off with boys. She didn't talk back - as far as she could help it - and she wasn't difficult - so long as she wasn't being told to do stupid stuff. She got good grades, most of the time, and she got along well with her teachers, unless she couldn't. She tried her hardest to do the right thing, even if the right thing wasn't the best thing to do. Most of the foster homes she'd been in had described her as a "nice child".

But she'd had one job - one precious, life-on-the-line, self-given job - and she'd failed.

She had lost Frisk.

She'd trusted in the foster parents to keep them home, and then in the city watch to block them off the mountain, and then in the helicopters to find them and bring them back. They had all failed her. And in trusting them, she'd failed herself.

Which was why she was now climbing the mountain herself, in the crisp near-dark of early dawn.

It wasn't really much of a mountain, more of a large hill. Couldn't be too big, considering a blind ten-year-old had managed to scale it. According to the authorities, Frisk's footprints had been found leading up to a large hole in the cliffside, about a mile from the city. There was no saving them, they'd explained. A hole that deep... there was no surviving a fall. No point in searching the thing, either.

Kel had different opinions. Even if there was no way Frisk could've survived, she still wanted to find the body. True, once she found it, there would be no more hope. Frisk's death would be definite. But at least, maybe, she'd have closure. There was no moving on, but there could be closure. Kel was brave enough to look for it.

Though whether she found it or not, nothing would ever be the same. Frisk had been such a huge part of Kel's life; it was like they'd known each other for all seventeen years of it. Frisk had given Kel a purpose, a reason to go on. And now... well, now that was gone.

Why is it gone though?! she couldn't help but wonder, anger pulsing through the numb shock still sitting in her veins. What were they thinking?! Why leave? Why climb the stupid mountain? Not only the stupid mountain, but the mountain outlawed to the public? Outlawed for safety reasons?

It just... it didn't make sense. It sounded like something Kel would do, not Frisk. Frisk had never expressed any interest in the mountain before. Plus, they were blind. How had they even...

But it didn't really matter how it had happened. What mattered.... well, was that it had happened. And it was all Kel's fault.

Unlike closure, the "hole" in question wasn't difficult to find. Wasn't the smallest of holes, either - roughly eight feet or so in diameter, from what Kel could see. Approaching it was like approaching a great jagged black mass, framed in twigs and fallen leaves. It had to be it. Kel found herself shining her flashlight around, trying to make out any 4Y-sized footprints indented in the ground. That was silly, of course - it had been more than twenty-four hours since Frisk was here; normal footprints simply don't last that long.

Kel held the flashlight in her teeth as she prepared the tough gloves and the giant heavy-duty rope she'd bought out of her fast-food restaurant pay. She was doing this the old-fashioned rope-climbing way, the way she'd always done it, from the first day she'd climbed that giant branchless oak in her parents' backyard. The hole didn't have a trunk, of course, but there were plenty around it, and she knew how to tie good knots. With her hands double-protected by gloves and calluses, she was sure to make it down to the bottom of that thing. And back up again, though she might give her arms a bit of a break down there.

She secured the rope around a nearby tree, the rest coiled around her shoulder. Then she approached the pit. Kel found herself getting even more angry the longer she looked at it. This was what had done it? This was what had claimed Frisk's life?