Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She’s learned how to believe.

So, she believes more than most when she shoots up in bed and mutters in her sleep while her husband stares, because her voice is loud and bound to wake Allie, and she forces herself awake with a pounding heart.

(For once, she believes in the dreams she never remembers, and it scares her more than her own regrets.)
 

“Shirley?” Kevin asks, but all she sees, all she hears, is her brother; “Singing in the Red Room.” She mutters and reaches a hand to her throat, as if she can somehow stop the tunes. Stop the music.

Stop her brother.

She’s out of bed and across the room before Kevin can blink twice, and rips her phone from the charger and presses her brother’s number. He doesn’t pick up. She tries again.

There’s a hollow tone, followed by a hollow voice and she hangs up before too little becomes too much, and she presses Luke’s number and he answers, out of breath as if he’s done other things than sleeping, but she knows, thinks, believes , that he knows why she’s calling.

“Steve.” Is all he says and she’s curling up on the floor, a white knuckled grip on the dresser, and nods. “Singing in the Red Room.” She whispers back, her chin tucked against her chest and Luke’s breath catches in his throat, as if he'd prayed for something different.

“I’ll go.” He replies, voice thick, and he’s gone before she can argue and she’s left waiting in the dark with Kevin watching her. He knows, to an extent, what’s happened to them. Leigh knows too.

But something, the part of her that wants to keep the illusion alive, tells her not to call her. She can call, but she doesn’t think she can call. She’s shaking her head, a hand to her head, and dials Theo’s number. Her sister’s on the phone after two rings, voice strained from sleep.

“I saw Steve.” She whispers and her sister’s breath goes quiet. Trish moves in the background and Theo scrambles out of bed and seemingly out the door before she replies. “You sure?” And that’s when Shirley Crain realizes there’s tears on her cheeks. She’s sniffling and nodding into the phone, wiping furiously at them while she whispers; “He was singing in the Red Room.”

“Have you called Luke?”

“Yeah. He shouldn’t go alone.” She whispers, knowing damn well Luke can’t enter the house alone and that Peter knows better than to leave their brother alone. Kevin has an arm wrapped around her and is guiding her back to bed when Theo hangs up and goes back to Trish. He drifts off to sleep not even two hours later, but she’s awake until her phone buzzes and Luke’s crying in her ear.

***

She’s stood like this many times before.

She always stands like this; greeting the dead with a sad smile and a plan in her head, because even if she’s done it a million times before, it doesn’t work without a plan

She’s stood like this twice before. This makes it thrice.

Theo isn’t there this time, doesn’t have anywhere to run away to, and Luke jumps out of the car before Peter’s parked and has her wrapped in his arms before Annie can open the doors to the van. He’s shaking and she knows she’s on the verge as well, but she keeps her tears back enough to wave Annie forward, down the hall and into the room.

Kevin has a hand on her shoulder and she’s shrugging it off when she leaves her family behind and goes to the one that was never supposed to leave. Not like this anyway.

She knows it’s Theo who’s been calling her phone since she called her two days earlier and told her what Luke hadn’t been able to, shellshocked and trembling, but she hasn’t bothered to pick it up now. She knows it’s Theo who’s calling Luke now and that it’s him who picks up with trembling fingers and a hollow voice.

She shoos Annie out the door and locks it, not bothering to remove her jacket before unzipping the body bag, her brother’s outline making it seem like anyone but him.

(It’s not anyone but him.

It had to go and be Steven Goddamn Crain.)

She’s watching him, sees the hollowness around his eyes, the purple and blackened bruises of death around them and the blue lips. He’s paler than he was all those summers ago when he read books in the shade, refusing the sun, and he’s thinner too, as if the house took more than just life from him. She looks, but she’s not quite sure if she sees, and lays a trembling hand over his forehead; as if though the cold is nothing but windbeaten skin on a cold winter mornings back when they were kids and Steve did what he always did and forgot his hat.
 

(For a moment, that’s what she sees; her big brother with his hair on end, nose red from the cold and a frown on his face that never really left.

Not even in death.)

She takes a breath and removes her hand, sheds her coat and reaches for her scrubs when there’s a knock on the door, the pressing down of the handle and a flicker in the lights. She doesn’t trust her own voice, so she walks to the door with the hair tie travelling between anxious fingers. Stops and presses her forehead against the flat of the door; it’s not because she doesn’t have to do this, she could ask Kevin to do it but it wouldn’t be right .

(She fixed Nell and Dad and she’ll fix Steve too.

She owes him this. Just as he owed them.

She owes Mom too, but that’s another story.)

She won’t ask Kevin. She just need to breathe for one moment more before reality is something her brother has decided he’s allowed to alter.

She flips the lock and steps outside, expecting Kevin but instead finding Luke’s blue eyes, solemn and quiet and she thinks he looks a little bit like he did after Nellie died. He wasn’t high. He was so close to ten years now, but for once, Shirley wouldn’t be mad at him for getting high again.

When Nell had come, she’d been cold. Tried to be cold. And then she’d tried the same with Dad and it had worked a little easier with him, but she wasn’t sure how she was going to do it this time.

“Can I see him?” Luke asks, hands in pockets and eyes on the floor. “You shouldn’t.” She replies, staring at the same spot on the floor as him, both of them silently wishing for footsteps neither should wish to hear. Because if they did, well, then there was just the simple truth that this wasn’t a dream at all.

“Please.” He runs a hand down his face, wiping imaginary tears away, and she meets his eyes again. “Did Nell come to you?” She asks, knowing the answer before he opens his mouth. He nods and bites his lip, because why else would he have picked up at two in the morning?

“And Abigail.” He says, suddenly, and her head snaps back up again. “Abigail? Why?” He shrugs and crosses his arms, hugging whatever warmth he can preserve. “She’s the reason I found him, but I-,” he stops and turns his head, as if maybe, just maybe, Abigail could give him an answer.

“I don’t know why I saw her.” She looks in the same direction as him, but all she sees is the memory of wheeling three family members down the hall to make them seem real again. She doesn’t know what he sees, but she suspects neither Nell nor Abigail wish to share the theories of omens with them.

“Is Theo coming?” He’s nodding as soon as the name leaves her lips and locks his eyes on the door, as if Steve is just working on his next book and is demanding peace and quiet and will soon come out. “Please.” He says and doesn’t move and he looks so broken that all she can do is nod.

Steve still lies there, as if asleep, fingers curled in rigor mortis and mouth wired shut and hair matted from lack of volume. Luke’s already wiping at his nose, clicking his tongue nervously against his teeth and stops short of the table, his own fingers tapping an unsteady rhythm against themselves. Steve’s not lying on the same table as Nell, and so it creates an illusion of sorts when Luke’s eyes travel to the other side of the room. Shirley knows he sees her, but she doesn’t push and doesn’t look.

(Shirley never did want to look.)

She puts a hand on his elbow, keeping him in place or keeping him from going down she doesn’t know. Luke’s already seen Steve gone, but not quite like this.

“Do you know why he did it?” He says, eyes never leaving his brother’s chest, as if he will somehow start breathing again even with the stitches creating a Y across his skin and the unnatural pallor to his skin making him stand out even in the stark light of the fluorescents. She hasn’t read the report, has kept it as far away as possible, so she shakes her head a bit but she still knows. Maybe she’s always known. Luke moves a hand from his pocket, a paper clutched in his shaking grip and she takes it with furrowed brows.

“He was dying.” He whispers and moves forward, stops by Steve’s feet while she reads, keeping his eyes far away from the obvious wound and hovers a hand over empty space.

“Does Leigh know?” She whispers back, crumbling the paper further in her hand and she thinks something flickers at the edges of her periphery, but she isn’t the one who can see the memories. “I think so. Don’t think Ellie knew, though.”

She’s across the room and punching lockers before she can stop herself, breaking the skin over her knuckles and screams her throat raw in rage and grief and something else, because this was not how it was supposed to go .

They were supposed to be safe . They were supposed to be free from the House and now they weren’t, because now she is the oldest and she doesn’t know what to do.

Luke grabs her from behind, tucks her against his chest and she cries into him, because there’s not just grief in the tears and her knuckles hurt differently than when she’d punched the table after Nell and before Dad.

“Someone else can do it, Shirl.” He whispers into her hair and she’s shaking her head before he’s finished, because the idea of that is stubborn and stupid. “I fixed Nell and Dad. I’m fixing him too.” She says through the lump in her throat, breathes through a clogged nose and refuses to avoid his gaze. “I can stay.” He offers and she shakes her head again.

“No. Take care of them.” She says and shoves him toward the door. “I’ll take care of him.”

He’s out the door before she can push again, wanting desperately to get away even when all he wants is to help. There’s a similar war in her as well, but she has to stay and he has to go.

***
 

She’s scrubbed up, the door’s locked again and the bag’s in the bin when the light flicker again and she hears the distinct sound of music.

There’s the gentle strumming of a guitar, strings plucked to a song about stars, distant and close at the same time and she remembers Mom singing the same song to them as kids.

Her and Steve, before Theo and the twins. Before Hill House.

“Stop.” She says and prepares the fluid, hooks tubes and bottles and pretends that it’s only in her head.

(It’s not, but she’s always been good at pretending.)

“Thought you liked that song.” She doesn’t look up from the tube in her hand, watching as the fluid travels through it and down to the stopper. “Stop.” She mumbles again and presses a hand down on his arm, watches the vessels pop and disappear and pop up elsewhere and tries to imagine anyone else.

“I had to, Shirl.”

“No, you didn’t.” There’s a sigh, a shift and a reply in the form of; “No, I didn’t.”

“Leigh’s upstairs with Ellie, who can’t understand why her Dad dies weeks after her birthday, so why the fuck are you here?!”

The ghost, the memory, the wish , is quiet and it might be gone, but she doesn’t know because she refuses to look. “I don’t care that you were dying. You should still be here.” She says and presses the tube into his arm, the fluid passing aimlessly through the vein and draining him of whatever’s left of him.

A part of her wishes it could drain him of his ghost as well. Drain him of the House.

There’s a knock on the door, and she shouts without meaning to; “Not now!”

“Shirley.” Comes the reply. “Not now, Theo.” A part of her is relieved it’s not Leigh. Or Ellie.

“He’s not ready yet.” She mumbles and maybe Theo somehow hears her, because she doesn’t ask again and the corridor is quiet before she can unhook the tube.

***
 

Leigh’s not there yet when she prepares him for the viewing, but Theo is and she’s hugging herself, without a glass this time, because she refused Trish’s suggestion of coming with her before it was time.

Luke’s not there either, taking it upon himself to spend time with his niece before she has to say goodbye. Shirley never says, but sometimes it is so goddamn tiring to watch people say one final goodbye.

(Maybe it’s worse now; now that the one person she has to say goodbye to loiters about the halls as if it was just another dinner party.)

“How did he do it.” Shirley doesn’t know if it’s a question or an accusation, but she straightens her brother’s tie and adjusts the collar and so, doesn’t answer. She fixes the lapels of his coat and pauses by his hands and and reminds herself to bring the makeup upstairs, because his fingers are turning blue again and there’s no easy way to hide it without more makeup.

“Shirley.” Her sister tries and all she does is shake her head, because Theo shouldn’t have to know. There should be someone else but Leigh and Ellie to keep this memory as the worst they’ve ever seen him in. Let this be the last and the worst. Let this be all that will be left once the rest of them are gone.

But Theo knows, because she’s a doctor for a reason, and she breathes through her nose and turns to leave, a gloveless hand covering her mouth as if to stop the meager lunch they had from coming back up. Shirley turns to speak, not tell, but her sister’s gone before she can.

Shirley doesn’t flinch when she sees Steve stuffing his hands in his pockets She doesn’t flinch when he looks just the same as he had at dinner a month earlier with his beard and his glasses and that godawful tie Theo gave him as a joke for his birthday; a tie that he kept wearing for every dinner they shared since then. There’s a sad smile and he nods head, in greeting and goodbye and there’s blood on his cheek. It’s a simple trail, so obvious and so crimson and it does break her heart to see him look so young and so incredibly, fucking sad.

It’s his own goddamn funeral.

Of course he should be fucking sad.

Chapter Text

When Luke Crain was four years old, he and his sister had begged Mommy for a cat. But, given how much they moved around, getting a cat wasn’t too good of an option. So, when they were five, they’d begged for a puppy instead.

When Luke Crain was six years old, his mother died and when he was thirty two, his sister died. Dad died too.

(Aunt Janet had a dog, an older one that would always fall asleep in Luke’s bed and crush his feet as Luke got taller. The dog, Puffy, had opted to sleep on the floor after that, his head just within reach if Luke ever woke up during the night and wished for some form of comfort.)

But when Luke Crain was thirty five and two years clean, he walked into a shelter and walked back out, the little cat snug in his arms and sounding a bit like a well oiled engine. She was small, chubby and with stubby legs, her tail a little crooked and one eye blown wider than the other, and with a coat a pale gray, it took everything he had not to name her Snow.

Instead, he named her Moon, and that was one hell of a weird cat. She slept on his feet just like Puffy had done before Luke managed to kick him off the bed, but instead of leaving and sleeping on the couch, she waddled up and over his chest and planted herself in the crook of his neck and buried her claws into his neck if he moved half an inch too much.

(And if that didn’t work? Well, there’s always a face one can lay on instead.)

Luke Crain was almost thirty six when Theo dragged him to a bar to celebrate his birthday early and he met someone with blue eyes and a smile full of teeth. Theo, finding better things to do than babysit her little brother now that he’d actually started talking to someone, left him there and didn’t call him until the next day, when all he could hear was a war of bees in his head and Moon meowing loudly from the foot of the bed; her usual spot by his neck now claimed by someone else.

When Luke Crain was thirty eight and Peter Sanderson was thirty six, they walked into the same shelter and walked back out with a bundle of black fur that came to terrorize Moon for the rest of her life. He was bigger than Puffy, but then again a lot of dogs were, and a giant compared to Moon. Her small frame didn’t stop her from hissing and whining over her new friend until they’d both agreed that sleeping on the bed would be easier of they were on opposite sides.

Peter, having been the one to make the final decision, named the dog Ash. Ash wasn’t too different compared to Moon; sneaking treats off the counter by either begging, jumping or simply taking the highroad and tearing across counters and knocking over plates and pans and there was a constant fight over who got to sleep where. They both flooded the bathtub once when Peter tried washing Ash; Moon being too curious to understand that porcelain is slippery when wet and falling into the tub and then Ash wagging his tail and jumping up and down and trying his best to get a hold of Moon’s flailing limbs with his own teeth.

(Peter wasn’t very happy for the rest of the day.)

Moon had easily become Steve’s favorite of the two, Ash grumbling in the corner until it seemed to be alright to trot over and plop down on Steve’s feet, keeping him from moving for an hour or two. Moon was Moon, soft and kind, and Ash wasn’t too different, but Luke saw more of Ash than Moon in Steve’s follow-up book, a story written solely for the purpose of kids.

Ash had, after all, become Ellie’s favorite.

***

Luke Crain was almost forty when he woke up to the sounds of whispers, a love song and a pounding headache. His heart didn’t beat to the rhythm of the song, simply going by hummingbird wings in his chest as he blinked into the dull light that shone in through the windows from the streetlamps.

He’d seen Nell plenty of times since the House. Had talked to her at length and then told Peter about her. About them . He had remembered with her, laughed with her and then mourned her when she’d gone and hadn’t come back.

(She was always there, she just couldn’t be there .)

Luke thinks it’s been two years since he saw her last in other things than memory or photograph; thinks of her in past terms as one does when someone is gone. But here she is, again, hair windswept as if though she’s run and eyes wide and sad and mouth a little open. She’s not looking at him; she’s just singing.

“You’ve broken my heart, and now,” he doesn’t hear the rest of it, knows it anyway and sings along. This is a reverie, he supposes. A trance. A broken record.

(This is just a memory.)

“You leave me.” He ends the verse there, looks up at her and he sees her upturned palms, slick with blood and something dark and Luke’s breath catches in his throat. Something moves on the edge of his vision and he snaps his head around just as Peter stirs in his sleep and reaches out a hand, but Luke is up and gone before he can connect.

She stands half in shadow, her dress as blue as always and her eyes just as much. She just looks, doesn’t speak and that is what makes Luke fall on his knees on the carpet. He’s never seen the ghosts outside of the House, save for Nell, and now something is different.

Something is wrong. Moon senses it too, raises her hackles and meows so loudly that Luke finds it a miracle if she can make a sound in the morning. Ash jumps off the bed and stalks forward, his nose barely brushing against Abigail’s dress and then he’s off, cowering under the bed as if something came out and bit him. Peter’s awake now too, but all he sees is Luke on the verge of tears on the bedroom floor with the cat clawing at empty air.

Nellie’s still singing, her hands over her eyes and hair swaying in the breeze of the dead, when the phone rings.

Luke moves his stiff limbs, climbs into the bed and grabs the phone.

“Steve.” He says before she can say anything, a hand fumbling in the dark for a pair of pants. He’s closer, he knows, and he’ll be damned if the House takes anyone else. Peter knows before he knows and is fully dressed before Luke has hung up the phone, his sister’s breathless voice trapped in his ears.

Luke wasn’t like Mom or Steve. He wasn’t like Dad and Nell. He wasn’t like Theo and Shirley. He was like himself; mended parts and a frayed mind, connected to one and none at all when the other half is long gone.

She stands there, though, eyes clouded and mouth fumbling with the words she never quite seemed to catch when they were younger and tried to sing the song for Mom.

The House is a mind and a body, but there’s no reason behind it; no great final plan and no fucked up deal with the devil.

It’s just a House.

***

It’s just a carcass in the woods, Luke tells himself when he pushes the gate open and leave Peter running after him, the both of them tripping over tufts of grass that’s taken over for the gravel on the road to the House.

(It’s just a House that took Mom and Nell and Dad.)

The doors are stuck, wedged in on themselves by age and rust and nature, but Luke puts his shoulder into the handle and cracks it open, metal grinding against stone and wood and it is so fucking dark that Luke starts to scold himself for not bringing a flashlight.

But he doesn’t need a flashlight, because the interior of Hill House is illuminated by the presence of its own horror.

Luke tries to breathe.

It comes out a scream. Or not so much as a scream, but a plea. He’s begging something that isn’t there to come back.

‘No’, is not an acceptable prayer an old lady had told Luke once when he’d found himself high and sleeping in a church, but ‘no’ is all that Luke can say.

He’s almost there, almost crouched, almost touching, when Peter grabs him by the arm and points, because this House has never been kind and it won’t start now.

Steve looks as confused as he does, neither expecting the other to be there in that shape or form, and while Steve looks more confused than sad, Luke is far more angry to feel any kind of grief. They both curse, neither one of them asking a question, and Luke doesn’t think he’s felt this kind of anger toward anything since Nellie died.

(Nellie died here, by a different staircase in the same fucking house. Mom and Dad did too.

Steve just had to go and be the odd man out.)

What and Why are the questions Luke asks but doesn’t ask. What and Why are questions simply answered by a shrug and eyes filled with something dark, just like Nell’s were back home.

(‘ This is home’ , someone whispers.)

Luke has begged many times for things that can’t come back; he’s begged for Mom and he’s begged for Nell, he’s begged for his best friend who overdosed three months before Nell died and he’s begged for the next fix during those first few days in every goddamn home he’s ever been in.

He’s begged, but never asked. The universe would give it to him if it wished, but Luke Crain had never been one to hold onto hope when it came to such things.

But now, he keeps begging for Steve to come home, because this isn’t fucking real.

But it is so, so very real and it takes both Peter’s eyes and Nell’s cold hands to keep him from chasing after his big brother, his hunched back and bespectacled eyes leaving Luke alone.

It’s a goddamn nightmare, being a Crain.

***

He calls Shirley in the car and she calls Theo and Luke doesn’t sleep for the two days it takes the coroner to hand over a body that wasn’t supposed to die there and Luke still doesn’t sleep when they leave home and take Steve back to Shirley.

Back to Leigh and Ellie and Theo.

There’s a buzzing of bees in Luke’s mind, but he leaves them alone and doesn’t listen to Nell’s soft singing, her voice the only thing allowed in this place Luke’s come to call ‘someplace’ .

The place where the dead and living are one and where there’s nothing left but eternal grief.

Someplace isn’t here. Someplace is nonexistent.

Someplace is a home.

Chapter Text

Leigh had first met Steven Crain at a shitty party at a mutual friend’s place a month before graduation, smack-dab in the middle of two colleges where both went on to not use either degree. Writer’s don’t need degrees, he’d told her. They just needed an active mind. Philosophy is an active mind, but in a different sense than for what he wanted to use it for.

She told him that law wasn’t something she particularly fancied, but it was something nonetheless. It seemed to get a laugh out of him, honest as can be, however dull of an attempt of a joke it was.

Leigh figured they both had active minds, but his was a beehive of noise and pictures, and he waved around his hands the whole night while she stayed quiet and smiling, both of them drunk out of their minds and too stubborn to notice that half the party contenders had either left or passed out on the plethora of couches. Someone was still singing further away, the tunes soon evaporating into empty noise and gagging sounds.

He’d asked her, quietly and under his breath, drunk and suddenly very shy, if dinner, or even lunch, was something she’d like to have. With him, of course. Screw their friends, he’d said, and that was when she had laughed and nodded. Said yes, to God knows what.

Said yes, to half a lifetime of something built on both lies and truths. Said yes, to an entire lifetime of love.

Because no matter how hard she tried, Leigh Crain could never seem to stop loving the boy with the greased hair and the crooked glasses. Could never seem to stop loving the man with a beehive in his head and underlying regrets in his eyes.

Maybe she would change something, had she been able to, but the only thing she would’ve changed then was that she hadn’t met him sooner. That she’d met the boy he wrote so colorfully about. Met the boy with the mother who would bring him chicken-rice soup whenever he was sick, who read him philosophy books when the others were asleep.

Met the boy with a smile in his eye and a twinkle in his smile.

Met the boy. And not the House lurking beneath.

***

They were both stubborn, neither willing to give in or give up. Neither willing to make compromises.

They both learned, even if it took time, that marriage is a bunch of compromises and broken promises shoved into a concoction of love and admiration and stupid questions just to rile laughs out of the other.

They both learned, Steve most of all, that you can’t be too selfish.

(The lies burn your hand. The truth sets you free.)

So, when he told her why the future of her dreams didn’t exist, she did the only thing she knew how to do; she grew quiet.

Leigh Crain, as Steve learned over the years, was loud when she was angry. They both were. They were loud when they were angry and they were quiet in times of grief.

But when Steve told her why, told her how.

(And, maybe he did lie to her there, just a bit. Just that little tiny bit to keep the lie back; let the burn of it engulf his entire fist into flames.)

When he told her, Leigh just grew quiet.

Steve wasn’t stupid. He knew, right then and there, that he had fucked up. This whole thing, built on his own fragile lie. He’d fucked it all up.

So, Steve ran. Ran and never told. Ran and didn’t tell until Nellie was gone and they were all angry in the foyer of his sister’s house.

Ran, and then he told. Told Dad about Leigh and him. About himself.

His own fear manifested into a lie that he built over the years. Built and transformed into a monster that couldn’t be so easily slain with just Luke’s lego sword. The monster, shaped like a House and smelling like mold, crept the edges of his awareness, months after Dad died and the House was all Steve’s.

When the lie, the new lie, was all Steve’s.

He told her of the first lie, the worst of them all. And now she was loud. Not louder than during any of their other fights, but still loud.

He told her something of the second, piece by piece, but some things are better kept to oneself.

And then Ellie was born.

Perfect, beautiful little Ellie.

Ellie, who had none of Steve’s rotten genes and was all Leigh and everything that made Steve Steve . Just enough of both of them so that their little girl would sleep with a nightlight until she had her own children, because her father was very loud when he slept and his nightmares were dark hallways and red doors and a mother with a voice of honey.

Ellie, who was dark haired and dark eyed, rosy-cheeked and gap toothed. She lisped because of the gap, trained herself to become a storyteller like her Dad, and she always had a pen tucked in the pocket of her pants. When her hair grew out, she had her mother teach her how to braid it, bundle it into a bun and then spike it with pens; that way, Sam Eccleston couldn’t pull at her hair in maths without getting hurt.

Ellie; small, perfect little Ellie. Simply named Ellie, in remembrance of someone gone and loved and never known. Simply named, but not simply raised. She wasn’t wild; not like Aunt Janet would describe Theo with her parties and rule breaking and her concurrent raid of the liquor cabinet. She was wild in the sense that ghosts roamed the heads of everyone she knew and never seemed to touch her.

Wild, in the sense that she was as normal as those who read her father’s books. Being wild is to be normal, was something her Dad told her when she got called to the headmaster’s office when she had, finally, stabbed Sam Eccleston in the hand with her pen.

Wild, in the sense that she carried notebooks in her bag, which later turned into thesis papers and bundled up copies of store bought pocket books, all carrying her father’s name. Which later turned into her father’s rediscovered notebooks, childhood notes and old pictures.

When she found those books, scribbled in childish writing and doodles, point-to-point stories, structured, schemed and complete nonsense, she’d gotten drunk on beer and almost crashed her car into a tree.

When she found the note her father wrote, to her and Mom, she threw up in the bathroom of her dorm room and corresponded with her roommates with notes under the door.

And when they told her her father was dead, barely ten years old and with eyes wide as moons, she hadn’t cried. She wasn’t like her mother, who fell to a heap, clutched Uncle Luke in one hand and the policeman by the other. She wasn’t like Dad.

She just stood and stared, imagined the shapes of the wallpaper come alive. To come back, just like Dad.

He would. He always came back.

(He promised.)

Uncle Luke came by later, before the wake, and brought Ash with him and Ellie took the dog with her to her room and refused to leave. But when Leigh did, finally, manage to wrangle her into the car, she held the dog’s collar hard enough to whiten the knuckles and hard enough that she hoped Dad knew.

She had always had the trick of knowing when someone wasn’t telling the truth. She knew Uncle Luke kept something from the both of them. Knew he mulled it over in his mind. Knew he knew why Dad wasn’t here.

When Aunt Shirley asked if she wanted to see her Dad, she marched up to the casket and stopped when she saw the lid, propped open by an unseen mechanic she didn’t understand yet. She saw the outline, saw what made Dad Dad , but also saw nothing she recognised.

“That’s not Dad,” she’d said then, turned until she faced Aunt Shirley and had stared at her with those wide eyes. Explanations doesn’t do things justice.

“Then who is it?” Aunt Theo asked, crouched down to see. Her eyes were red, and so was her nose and her hands wore no gloves, but her hands were still warm when they touched her arm. Ellie simply shook her head, turned her hands into fists and tried to imagine something different.

(The wallpaper didn’t change and the truth didn’t set her fists aflame. This wasn’t a lie.

It should’ve been.)

Aunt Shirley did get her to see him, eventually. She held Ash’s collar like a lifeline, and the dog only whined once when faced with the spectrum of smell for something that shouldn’t be there.

“He can’t see.” She whispered, hoped no one heard her, and curled up in her seat next to her mother, the dog by her feet and the tears oh so very close now.

She didn’t cry until she asked Aunt Shirley to put something in her father’s hand. And Aunt Shirley, always happy and now very, very sad, nodded yes and took her up to her father once again, opened his hand and watched how Ellie stuffed a pen in between his cold fingers.

It was just the nub of one, nothing left but half an inch of lead and half an inch of wood, color chipped from years of use. It’s his lucky pen, she’d said when asked.

The one he took wherever he went, pen and notebook and phone, and came back with ideas and stories no one could have dreamed up.

“Now he can write stories again.” She’d said and left Aunt Shirley staring at her brother’s shadowed face, glassless and empty.

Death was supposed to be beautiful, people said. Shirley wasn’t inclined to agree when her brother just looked pale and porcelain, crafted by someone who didn’t have a clue what a human being, her brother , had looked like.

Death was ugly, scary, and perhaps a little hopeful. Because that was the only thing Shirley could think of when her brother’s ghost stared, smiled and held up a small little pen in a lifelike hand.

Chapter Text

Theo always had to know. She always wanted to know.

Now, she really wishes that she wasn’t like that.

The words burn behind her eyes and the knowledge scorches her mind and the booze should be helping, but it really fucking doesn’t.

She read the file. She wishes she hadn’t.

She read the file; she wishes she’d burned it instead.

“Fuck me.” She says, whispers to a dark sky, and wipes tears from her cheeks. She’s not the emotional drunk Nell was and she’s not the lunatic drunk Luke is; both of the good kind, but she’s not like them. She’s not quite sure what kind of drunk she is half the time; but right now she’s the angry kind.

If she had to guess, she is the quiet, angry drunk. But some people cry when they’re angry. Shirley’s just an annoyed drunk who have a voice way too loud for occasion. But Shirley’s angry half the time anyway, so maybe it makes sense that she’s not angry when she’s drunk.

(Theo had gotten hold of some very juice secrets that way, but they were secrets she didn’t dare to talk about.

Her sister’s a mortician, after all.)

Theo isn’t the wandering drunk. Get her really drunk and she’s not walking far. Now, however, she sits cross legged on the grass, hands folded in her lap and stares straight ahead in a place she barely remembers getting to. She probably walked, because she was probably drunk when she got there.

The dew has long since soaked through her jeans, and there’s goosebumps over her arms. It’s March; too cold to be without a jacket and too hot to wear a parkas, but she really doesn’t give a fuck right now.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting there, but maybe it’s long enough for Trish to wake up and come look for her or maybe it’s long enough for other people to start to notice. There are people there; teenagers either getting high or getting fucked up in more ways than one. There’s an old lady wiping twigs off of a gravestone further down the green, and someone’s throwing a ball to a dog.

It’s after eleven at night and she has a funeral to go to.

“What did we do?” She asks no one and looks at her sister’s stone, traces VANCE with her eyes and leans her mouth into her hand and stifles a hiccup. She’s almost expecting an answer, but she shakes her head and just looks. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

( “What did we do to deserve this?” )

There stands a house in the woods, hidden from view and born and bred of hate and fed with fear.

She’s lost in memory when there’s a hand on her shoulder and she shoots up like a rocket, bottle in hand and ready to throw. She almost throws up from what she feels through the touch and leans against her sister’s stone and wishes her hand would stop fucking shaking.

She doesn’t see the old lady until the touch has given her her sight back, and she thinks that maybe the lady just wanted help with something, but Theo is more than ready to throw the bottle across the woman’s head if she makes a wrong move.

“Can I help you?” She asks and wills her heart to slow. The lady looks at her, folds her hands in front of herself, and just smiles kindly. Just looks at Theo the way a grandmother might’ve looked at her, had she had one.

“Well?” She asks and stuffs her own hand deep into her pocket, bottle clinking against the stone. Nell would haunt her for the rest of her life if she broke the bottle over her gravestone. Or, maybe not Nell’s own gravestone, but she’d haunt her for spilling booze and glass across Arthur’s stone.

The woman keeps smiling, and then she opens her mouth and Theo really fucking wishes that she wasn’t drunk.

***

They’re ten minutes late to the pre-wake bullshit because she forced Trish to drive her to the nearest clothing shop so she could get herself a pair of gloves.

She had wacked the old lady with the bottle. But the only effect it had had was the large cut across Theo’s palm that was now glaringly obvious to everything and everyone. No one questioned a Theo with gloves; everyone would question a Theo with bandages.

They’re ten minutes late and she thinks that’s why Luke is pacing outside the funeral home when they park the car until he pulls her aside before she’s fully exited. Pulls her to the back of the house with wide eyes and a mouth that is moving way too fast for Theo to catch anything that tumbles out.

“Slow down. Start over.” She orders and crosses her arms and meets him with much of the same look she has for the more talkative kids she treats. Luke swallows once, drags a hand through his hair and looks around twice, before he turns back to her.

“I saw Nell.

“I figured.” He looks at her with furrowed brows that screams of confusion and she hangs her head.

“When you found Steve. You saw her, right?”

“Y-yeah. But that’s not what this is about.” 

“Then what is it about? I figured you’d be happy to see Nell.” He’d told her before, before this whole mess started again, that he’d seen Nell from time to time and that it somehow made everything easier. Twin thing and everything.

Theo had learned to accept a lot of things since Nell and Dad stepped into the Great Beyond, so she hadn’t been too surprised when he’d told her.

“I am. B-but…” he trails off and stares off to the side again and Theo follows his gaze this time and feels how her breath leaves her throat for the second time in less than ten hours.

“She said something was wrong.” Luke mumbles and Theo pulls at the gloves, her skin itching just by the mere sight of him.

She wasn’t one to see ghosts. She's guessing she could feel them, but she didn’t think she could see them like Luke could.

(Or Steve could.)

He stands under the tree Shirley and Kevin planted the year they first started their business. It’s younger than Jayden by a few years, but it’s small and blooms once every year, but it’s March and the tree is supposedly very dead and dormant. And yet, there are petals that cling to the branches.

Cling to the branches like ghosts to people. (Like memories and regrets and childhood dreams.)

He stands there, head cocked to the side and hand outstretched as far as he can before tipping or taking a step. He stands there, eyes plastered with a hazy sheen of cloudy gray and lips chapped worse than what any frostbite could produce. He looks bruised; as if someone punched him one too many times  and one time too hard, and his skin blisters in both green and gray and purplish blue.

He stands there, and he looks so very, very dead.

“Is Nell here?” Theo doesn’t turn around to ask, just keeps looking at Steve as if though he’ll disappear if she moves. “No.”

Steven smiles a smile full of yellowed teeth.

Then, something happens.

It’s just that neither of them are sure of what exactly.

Steve jerks away, almost drops into the tree, and pulls his arm back to himself. He spins in a circle, stares at the sky and suddenly looks very, very alive. And so very confused.

“Steve?” Luke asks and Theo grips his arm as he passes her, grips him as well as she can in her silk gloves. He’s bigger than her, but she clings to him to the best of her abilities, and he does stop. He does stop, but that doesn’t keep him from staring at what once had been their brother. (Was, is, wasn’t.)

“I dreamt of you.”

The words are quiet and he turns back to them both with cloudless eyes and hair no longer dried with something dark. He heaves breath after breath, close enough to a panic attack that they both takes a step forward to help, but stop when he keep looking at them.

“Get out.”

“What do you mean?” Luke asks, soldering on on a path probably best left untouched.

“It’s time to go home, Steve.”

Nell stands close enough for Theo to want to throw up from the way it makes her skin crawl. She stands there and looks just like they do; stares at their older brother in the red sweater.

(“He had a red sweater, Theo.” Luke will say later when they sit in their chairs, thirty minutes before the wake, and all she will do is nod.

“And then it wasn’t.” He’ll say and Theo won’t ask what he means until much later, when she wants to go to sleep and all she’ll see is her big brother dressed for a funeral rather than a book reading.)

“We have to go home.” Steve stares at her as if she’s grown an extra head, but he takes a step nevertheless. She meets him halfway, doesn’t move to touch, and only mumbles it again; “we have to go home.”

There’s a hint of something else in her voice, a hint of fear or disapproval. Not anger. Never anger.

Nell was only ever angry when she couldn’t do what Theo or Shirley could, and she turned out the better of them for not doing those exact things. Theo doesn’t ever think she’s seen her little sister really angry.

And she hopes she ever will.

“It’s not home.” He replies and peers at her through those old glasses. Nell seems to smile, pale and lovingly; “no. But it’s close.” She whispers back.

“Something’s wrong.” Theo says, echoing Luke who echoed Nell, who now echoes back. It echoes round and round in a circle, and that’s when Nell turns to them.

“It’s the House.” She mumbles and Steve meets their eyes, pale and afraid.
“It’s Mom.” He says.

Nell just shakes her head.

“It’s the House. We’re just cherry blossom petals.” She says and smiles sweeter than anyone dead should be allowed to do.

Chapter Text

Steve stares up at the ceiling sometimes, when he thinks he's alone.

He's never really alone; he knows this, but it is so much easier to pretend that he is when his thoughts doesn't make any kind of sense.

They hadn't started right away, the thoughts that weren't his. They took time, it felt like at least, and then Nell was gone more than she was there and he never really saw Dad. The thoughts seemed to be all that mattered, and when the hell did thoughts start to hurt enough that nothing makes any sense no matter how you twist and turn?

He’d told Luke that he wasn’t like Nell. He wasn’t like Nell, never would or could be, but in some way or another the Crains’ are all alike. At least their kids, it seemed.

(Steve. Nell. Mom. The three the quiet and empty part of you never wish would come.)

So, Steve isn’t actually too surprised when he finds himself staring up at the cherry blossoms with a head abuzz with nothing.

Nothing, except the low grinding noise of thoughts pressing against a wall. It’s so loud, and hurts so much, that it’s a wonder he doesn’t scream.

Then again, screaming has never helped anybody.

It had started easy. Had started clear and somewhat with only an odd mix of serenity and chaos.

It had started, and had ended just as fast.

Luke had pulled Peter out the door, away from the dead and the hollow, and that’s when Steve had, finally, met Mom again.

The House hurt. It pulled and pushed and prodded and wanted , and Steve wanted nothing . Nothing but the calm Mom always had.

He should’ve been scared. Tentative. He should’ve stepped away; hidden himself in some dark corner Mom never learned about, but she was so warm and alive it had only brought all that childhood longing back to the very front of his mind.

She had taken his hand, and Steve had thought, for a bleak moment, that he’d heard Nell shouting in the foyer.

He didn’t hear her after that.

***

There’s something wrong with him, apart from the fact that he is so very, very fucking dead.

He tears apart the Room more than the House likes, and it hurts all the more because he does it. It isn’t until he breaks the vanity that he sees what everyone else sees.

Why not even Poppy is willing to look at him but from a distance of two rooms and a pane of glass.

He’s dead. And death is, sometimes, so fucking ugly.

The mirror shatters as soon as his fist connects.

***

Nell has a theory.

She can’t tell him, but he knows she knows something he doesn’t. But, then again, Nell was always the better of them.

She talks to him, keeps Dad away for reasons he doesn’t think he’d quite understand had he even been told, and tells him the stories he told them as kids.

(Before and After. In Between.

When everything still seemed to matter.)

She tells him his own story; retold to fit another narrative. He recognizes the hymns and the verses, but he doesn’t quite grasp the concept of me . He doesn’t ask her why, until she’s finished the story with Dad.

(Dad stares from the top of the staircase, but he’s gone before Steve can look.)

“What’s wrong with me?” He asks her, and she looks so surprised and sad that Steve just wants to hug her and hush her and pull all the nightmares away with another story. But his mind is blank with nothing but darkness and that low, grinding noise, and he can’t even think of a bedtime story.

(He told Ellie one last story before he pulled the car away for the last time. He can’t remember it.

He almost wishes he hadn’t left that night.

He doesn’t know why the almost hurts so much.)

Nell looks at him, and moves to take his hand, but Mom’s voice is sharp and loud and suddenly they’re both just kids again, caught red handed in the cookie jar.

Mom is dressed in red, and Steve thinks he’s always hated that color.

***

The tree is beautiful, even in the early spring when it’s not awake enough to show its full beauty.

It’s beautiful, and Steve is the ugly, dead thing staring up at the light pink with a hunger in glass eyes.

“I dreamt of you.” He says, and looks so fucking dead that he wants to pull his own eyes out and bury them somewhere he can gaze at the sky.

The sky has always been beautiful. Leigh has always been beautiful.

Ellie has always been beautiful.

His siblings have always been.

Death has never been.

His breath -- his useless fucking breath -- catches in his throat and he wishes that all this bullshit would just stop. It’ll never stop, not really.

The grinding noise is like an off-key choir in his head, and he wishes it would just stop.

He doesn’t know why he’s here. Doesn’t know how he’s here, just that he is and that he wishes that he wasn’t. He doesn’t even know where here is, until he sees himself dressed in black.

“Get out.” He mumbles and presses a hand to his temple and doesn’t know how it makes him look like a child.

(A dead child. A fucking dead child.)

And then Nell’s there and she has some of Mom’s calm now, learnt over years of too close proximity to what isn’t truly sane or real, and she wants him to come back.

Her eyes are dark, just like his, and she smiles sadly and wants him to go back home. Home sounds nice, but he doesn’t want to.

(Isn’t he home? The only one missing is Shirley.

Something had been home for the longest time, but now, he doesn’t want it to be the House.)

“It’s not home.” And Nellie shakes her head, but prompts it nonetheless. She wants to go home. Steve wants to go home.

He wants, for once in his life, to rid himself of Mom. Of the House.

Rid himself, once and for all, of the color red.

***

He thinks he still looks odd, later when he stands in the doorway, and gazes upon a scene never supposed to be seen.

His little girl talks about his missing glasses, and Steve smiles. Actually, truly smiles since he shattered the last mirror in the entire House.

(If he thinks hard enough, he can just about feel the bruises and lacerations had his knuckles been flesh and blood remade.)

Shirley saw him, both in the morgue before and in the big white and blue room now, and he smiled despite himself. Held the pen, small and soon enough useless, between two fingers.

Held it there, until the grinding noise came back and he was gone.

***

Steve stares up at the ceiling when he thinks he’s alone; when he wishes to stop dreaming and stop imagining.

It’s the only time he sees Dad.

They don’t talk, and they both wish they would, but they both keep their mouths shut and just sees.

There’s little left to say when you said everything a lifetime ago.

Poppy Hill taunted him once, with her wispy white eyes and her yellow smile, but she had left him alone before she could do it a second time. No one knows exactly why, but no one had seen Poppy Hill look anything but gleeful and strange. Nell said she’d looked scared.

(They’d called her crazy. Steve wondered if people would call him that too.)

Steven Crain is only ever alone when glass shards digs into his fingers, in the place where there had once been a window.

There’s no window there; only a giant hole where a barrier had once been.

He’s only ever alone, when he figures it out.

When he figures it out, closes his eyes, and wishes for better things.

***

There stands a vanity in an empty rooom.

In a room where the walls are black; spotted and cold and where the door is a crimson red. There stands a vanity; pale green and blue, faded and cracked. ( Haunted. And loved .)

The mirror is shattered by skin and bone and blood. Open a drawer, let the spiders out. Close it in, open once more, let the rats come scurrying out.

Open the hidden compartment at its bottom, or open the same as before, and let the pain out. It’s already dark outside; what can a little more pain do?

Tilt the mirrors, close them in, see the fear in nothing known. See the remembrance of what you’ve forgotten. Fold them out, straighten them until you’re afraid they’ll snap off and lets see if something stares back. Black, haunted eyes, empty smiles and the promise of something red. Of something damned.

There stands a vanity in a locked room, hidden from sight and sound and memory. A vanity, once so beautiful and alive, now so cracked and old. Poppy Hill stared into those mirrors and imagined a life lived, smiled hollowly and listened to the banging in the walls. Olivia Crain stared into those same mirrors, so many years later, and saw the future promised in silver tables and poisoned veins.

But look into them now, when you are nothing but a memory trapped in a mind of regret. What do you see now, that your mother couldn’t see?

Do you see her? The little girl with a shared name, and maybe, just maybe, do you see what came of the others? Your brother and your sisters, kids and grandkids later and gravestones in plots so far away that you couldn’t help but laugh over the House’s anger and lack of reach.

Maybe you do. Or, maybe you simply see what the House has created; warped and changed to fit a narrative you didn’t write. To fit a story where there’s nothing to solve and nothing to forgive.

There stands a vanity, blackened by mold and disuse, wood ingrained with something different than what you made it. You created light and warmth. And the House doesn’t seem to like it.

You always told Ellie, and your siblings when they were younger, that being afraid of the dark wasn’t a bad thing. And you never chastised them for choosing the simplicity of night lights or cracked curtains, never said anything when the twins crawled into your bed at night and held you tight and you never told them how it made you feel safe too.

You don’t tell Nell, she knows anyway, how holding her hand in the big, empty House is a comfort you never thought you needed.

You broke a promise. You don’t intend to break any more of them.

You’ve been enough of a good liar in your life, but Nell could always tell. So could Mom. But the House can’t, so you love it until you can get away with not loving it, when the House has grown content with what you have on offer; the love between mother and child and the love that comes with being sorely missed.

You hate it more than you love it, takes Mom’s hand and smiles against stiff cheeks streaked with blood until you can let go and look to something different.

Nell and Dad, Abigail and the Dudleys.

Look to something that isn’t half of a whole.

***

The concept of time does not exist, so you don’t know how much time has passed when the House crumbles apart just a tiny bit.

You suspect why it crumbles; why the east wing cracks against itself with stones and wood and glass and you can’t help but laugh. You laugh, and then Mom screams, and that’s when you have to hide. You and Nell and Dad; hunkered to the west, away from the carnage and the pain and away from the House.

Away from Mom.

You suspect, but you don’t know.

It takes some more time, and then it crumbles again and this time, the wind gets in; blows dust and rain through cracks and holes. It happens again, not so long after that, and there’s something gone from you. Something disappeared with the stones of the House.

You know, but you don’t leave.

After all, you made a promise.

(A life is a promise fulfilled. Is that what you see?)