Work Text:
No matter the weather, season or year, the inherited grandfather clock in the inherited house continued to swing to the same rhythm it did all those years ago. It ticked through the hallways, at a lowly adagio pace, reverberating against aged walls and falling upon ears that had stopped listening long since. A man walked through his house, quiet footsteps sweeping against the same floors he so frequently ran across in his childhood.
Everything was eerily similar. Each trinket sat motionlessly in its place, the same way they did the year before and the year before that, untouched. Every room, each one too big for only himself and his brother, echoed every sound he made, the frequencies bouncing endlessly around the walls.
It was all so familiar, yet there was a feeling he couldn’t shake.
No matter how unchanged each room seemed, there was always a slight difference. The smell of dust that penetrated the air, betraying the fact that no one had dared enter the house after his brother’s arrest. The formation in which the curtains were folded, pleated by a detective that investigated the house during the fateful trial, that his brother would have corrected without hesitation if he were there. The old vanity in his brother’s bedroom, which used to house a small bottle of nail polish. Such minor details would have gone unnoticed by anyone else, but to him, they were impossible to ignore.
With every thing Klavier noticed, the house felt less like his old home, more like a forgery of what his home once was.