Chapter Text
It was dark. He closed his eyes and there was nothing but an eternal void.
He opened his eyes.
The skies wailed.
The seas roared.
The world felt as if it was falling apart. He could feel it, like there were hooks buried in his flesh.
Above him, something screamed in pain. Its pain was his own; was it also his own screams? Or were his screams just an echo of theirs?
The earth shook as whatever screamed fell; the silence left behind was its own agony.
Where once the sky was blue, it was now purple, violet, and it rained with his blood. From it, the valleys were carved and the shadows deepened, and from his body, the ancient spine of a mountain was formed. It was only fitting.
He no longer knew who he was, or whose death he had witnessed, just that grief that choked him, turned his blood as cold as ice. It closed over him like a coffin, ice then water, and when he opened his eyes again, it was dark once more.
Then he opened his eyes again, somehow, and he saw the sun again, and the sky as blue and merry as if that memory of raining blood and agony had been only an awful dream. He smelled fresh cut grass and fresh earth and the sweet smell of romaritime flowers, which somehow smelled like the sea.
Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes and basked in the warmth of the sun. It was all a dream.
“Oh Neuvillette!” Furina wailed, voice muffled by the windows of the car. “It’s terrible! Truly awful!”
With a sigh, Neuvillette tugged his keys out of the ignition and slid out of the car. He hit a patch of uneven pavement and stumbled before catching himself on the door and standing to his full height. Though he would not call himself particularly tall, Furina liked to tease him for driving such a small car. She called it his “clown car”, driving from “clown town” to “clown work”, and now to “clown middle-of-nowhere”.
“What is ‘truly awful’, Furina?” he asked as he closed the door behind him. He opened the backseat and began gathering the cleaning supplies that they’d purchased in town.
“Look at it!” Furina wailed.
“Look at what?” Neuvillette asked. From inside the car, all he could see was her back from hips to shoulders; half of his limited view of the house was blocked by her body.
He nearly knocked his head on the top of the door as he backed out, arms laden with cloth bags. They’d gotten strange looks at the store in town when they declined plastic bags in favor of the folded bags that they’d packed with them. It seemed that the common practice in the city of using cloth bags, rather than plastic, did not translate. Still, they treated it as an adorably strange little quirk and had packed their supplies in the bags they’d provided.
Neuvillette was sure that it would be yet another thing that people would gossip about. It seemed that the well-worn trope of gossip being the backbone of small towns was true.
“Furina,” he said when he saw her begin to walk toward the house. “Will you help me unload?” He knew from experience that if he let her gain momentum, he’d be doing all the unloading by himself. While he didn’t mind it, it was simply more efficient if she carried a bag in herself.
Pirouetting on a foot—and stumbling when her sneaker caught on a chunk of pavement—Furina bounced back to the car. “I’ll carry in the food!”
The stairs groaned as they climbed to the veranda and Furina squeaked, dancing away in a trail of creaks from wood that was probably older than both of them combined. Neuvillette set his bags down and reached into his pocket for the key. It was a shiny, modern thing that went into a shiny, modern lock over a shiny, modern handle. Set in an old-style door, in an old-style frame, on an old-style house whose architecture was from over a century ago, it seemed out of place.
Though he always thought that it would stick, the door swung open smoothly and silently. He supposed that they didn’t make doors the way they used to, if such an old thing still worked as well as it did.
“Weeh,” Furina whined but nonetheless dashed past him and into the empty kitchen with her food. “Come on, come on,” she called as Neuvillette bent to pick up his bags again. “I’m hungry!”
“You’re always hungry,” Neuvillette said as he gently nudged the door closed with his hip. It closed with a satisfying click and he allowed himself a brief smile. He set his bags down in what he supposed was the living room and walked into the kitchen. “But we can eat now.”
He walked into the kitchen and was unsurprised to find that Furina had already opened the takeout containers. She looked at him with a comically guilty look that was all for show, her cheeks puffed out with food.
“Barbarian,” he told her. “There are utensils in the bag.”
“Etthuus oo,” she said around her mouthful of fried rice. “Omma lehdeh.”
Neuvillette snorted. “Right,” he said. “‘A lady’ indeed.” He lifted the brown paper bag from where Furina had tossed it aside and, peeking inside, winced when he saw that the bottom was dark with grease. But, as he had expected, he found cheap wooden chopsticks, a few plastic forks, a few packets of sauce, and a few crumpled napkins as thin as tissue paper. “Here,” Neuvillette said, handing her one of the forks and some of the crumpled napkins.
“Do you think I can’t use chopsticks?” Furina asked. “Or did they just assume that we can’t?”
“Either way, I know that though you can use chopsticks passably, you will inevitably spill fried rice all over the floor,” Neuvillette replied.
Furina rolled her eyes. “You bought a broom, didn’t you? We can sweep it up.” She eyed the floors. “They probably could use a good cleaning. Did you see the counters?”
The counters and some of the old wooden furniture were what had sent them into town in the first place. Furina had touched something and had screeched at Neuvillette that her hand was covered in dust. Though Neuvillette had expected to do some cleaning when he arrived, he hadn’t expected that quite so much would have to be done.
“You probably need to find professional cleaners,” Furina continued, jabbing the air with her fork. A chunk of fried rice fell from one of the cheap plastic tines and flopped sadly on the ground. “Oh look, a mess,” she said. “Gimme those chopsticks. Gimme gimme.”
Neuvillette ignored her and unwrapped his chopsticks from the paper. When he split them, they broke unevenly and he made a face. He tapped them against the back of his hand to get them evenly in his hands, and dug into his vegetable stir fry.
“Oooh,” Furina cackled. “That means you’ll have ugly children.”
Neuvillette paused with a piece of broccoli halfway to his lips. “ What? ”
Bouncing on her toes, Furina waved her fork around like a conductor at an orchestra. “If you break your chopsticks ugly, then you have ugly children,” she told him.
So he had heard correctly. Neuvillette’s brows rose. “And where did you hear that?”
Furina shrugged, and another clump of fried rice fell from the cheap paper carton to the floor. “Nour,” she said and Neuvillette braced himself for a long and confusing string of hearsay. “You know, Nour? That one Garde? Do you remember him? He said he heard it from his girlfriend who heard it from her boyfriend.”
“I remember Nour,” Neuvillette told her. “We had a meeting with him not three days ago.” He ate the piece of broccoli held in his chopsticks, chewed, and swallowed. “And if he heard it from his girlfriend, who heard it from her boyfriend, wouldn’t that mean that he heard it from himself? Or would that mean that she’s cheating on him?”
Furina gasped and nearly dropped her container of fried rice. “ Neuvillette! ”
“Or perhaps they are in a polyamorous relationship,” Neuvillette mused. “It’s none of my business either way.”
Jabbing her fork at him, Furnina said, “No lawyering! I forbid it! You , monsieur , are on sabbatical! ”
Neuvillette wrinkled his nose. He didn’t dignify that with a response, dipping his chopsticks into his stir fry and emerging with a wavy piece of carrot which he ate as daintily as one could with a pair of cheap chopsticks and Liyuen takeout.
“Besides,” Furina said and he watched as the fork went flying from her hand as she gestured wildly. It smacked against the wall, leaving behind a little smudge of grease, and then fell to the ground.
Wordlessly, Neuvillette handed her another fork which she took, her pale cheeks rosy with embarrassment she so rarely showed. He was tempted to pinch her cheeks the way she used to do to him when they were in college, but his hands were full and he didn’t feel like taking the risk that he’d drop his food. Though he’d teased her that she was always hungry, having food in his hands—even greasy, Liyuen style fast food—reminded him that he was also hungry, and that he and Furina had spent the past two days preoccupied with his move.
“As I was saying!” Furina said, gesturing with her fork again. She paused. “ What was I saying?”
“I have no idea,” Neuvillette said as he picked up a snow pea and ate it.
She made as if she was about to smack his shoulder, even though they stood on opposite ends of the kitchen; he twisted his shoulder out of the way as if she was close enough to hit him.
“Eat your food,” Neuvillette told her as he daintily picked up another piece of broccoli from his takeout container. He felt grease on his fingers, leaking out from the cheap paper container, and did his best to ignore it. “We still have a lot of cleaning to do.”
Furina whined but she had actually wanted to help him—had insisted on it, in fact—and shoveled food into her mouth faster. He kept an eye on her, wondering if he should be concerned that she’d choke. When it suited her, she could eat as delicately as any lady in any period drama she insisted they watch together. Most of the time, though, she ate like a gremlin—her words, not his.
(He would describe it as a toddler that thought that a cartoon character’s expression of hunger was something to be emulated. It always surprised him that though she could shovel food into her mouth that quickly, there wasn’t as much mess as he’d expect.
There was still a mess, of course. But not a particularly large one, and Furina was usually very good at cleaning it up.)
“No’,” Furina said around a mouthful of fried rice. She jabbed a fork at him and another chunk of fried rice plopped to the ground. She put the back of her hand to her mouth as she chewed and swallowed. “Nope! Nope, nope, nope, keep eating.” She jabbed her fork at the rest of the food on the counter. “You barely ate!”
“I ate enough,” Neuvillette told her. “I want to get this done.”
“And this is why we’re here,” Furina told him, her voice lowering from the playful tone she used in the office and in her personal time to the voice she used in the courtroom when she wasn’t interested in taking sass from anyone. “You need to take better care of yourself.”
Neuvillette set his takeout container—mostly empty, despite her concern—on the counter and grabbed one of the fortune cookies. Whoever had packed their bag at the Liyuen restaurant had seemed to go a little overboard with them. “Happy?” he asked as he ripped open the thin plastic and snapped the cookie in half with his thumb. He tucked the plastic into the brown paper bag that their food had came in and dodged Furina’s grab for him. “I’ll snack and come back when I’m hungry again,” he assured her. “There’s a lot of work to do before the movers get here.”
Munching on one half of the cookie, Neuvillette looked at the slip of paper that had been tucked inside. On one side was a string of zeros; on the other, it said “ Your personalized message here ”. Snorting, he tucked his “fortune” into his pocket and went to get the cleaning supplies.
The room that he wanted to make his office may have once served a similar purpose to one of the previous owners of the house, judging by the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining two of the walls. They’d seen better days, worn and scratched and so covered in dust that some of them appeared to be made of some kind of gray wood rather than whatever brown wood had been used.
(He wasn’t exactly up to date with types of wood. So long as it was sturdy, he hadn’t really cared. Furina was the one that cared for the type, whether it was natural or composite, what color it was, whether it matched the rest of the room. Neuvillette, at least in terms of his personal space, was more of a “functional” kind of person, rather than someone that focused too much on aesthetics. That’s what he had Furina for.)
A few books had been left behind, old volumes with yellowed pages and bound covers that had faded with prolonged exposure to the sun through the wall of windows looking out over the yard to the trees at the edge of the property. If he angled his desk correctly, he might be able to look out over the swaying grass to the nearby river.
But his desk wouldn’t be arriving for another day or so when the movers arrived. Not for the first time, Neuvillette was glad that he had listened to the relator’s suggestion of delaying their arrival—there was a lot of cleaning to be done.
He set up the step ladder, creaking in its newness, and climbed to the top to reach the top of the first shelf. Somewhere else in the house, he could hear Furina begin to play music from her phone, some kind of rock cover of a classical song. Remembering the safety things that they’d also purchased, Neuvillette climbed down and found a mask and slipped it over his nose and mouth, then a pair of goggles and nitrile gloves.
Starting his year of sabbatical with some kind of eye or lung infection was not something he intended to do. Furina had teased him in the store, but when he went through the supplies, he saw that she had grabbed her pair as well.
He climbed the step ladder again, duster in hand, and peeked over the top of the shelf. There was a small doll tucked up there and Neuvillette carefully wrapped his hand around it. It was creepy, as many old dolls were, with an empty stare and blank smile painted on a smooth wooden face. There were even round smudges of paint or pigment that had once been pink on its little cheeks.
Despite its unnerving stare—and its overall unnerving appearance—Neuvillette was quite impressed with it. It was dressed in a yellow dress that crinkled as he handled it and after a moment, he realized that the dress wasn’t made of fabric but, strangely enough, what appeared to be some kind of plant. The leaves were sewn together like fabric and cut like a layered costume from…well, Neuvillette wasn’t an expert in those kinds of intricacies, and the doll was old enough that it was sincerely hard for the layman to tell. He thought that it looked like the layered robes of Inazuma or Liyue, though.
Carefully, he climbed down from the step ladder and tucked it on one of the wide windowsills. Its little dress crinkled and cracked and Neuvillette suppressed a shiver, unsure why he felt so unnerved by it.
Perhaps Furina would be amused by it. Maybe he could find someone in town that knew what it was, or would have a suggestion of what to do with it.
He climbed back up to the top of the step ladder and picked up his duster. It was an old-fashioned one made with feathers—real or synthetic, he wasn’t sure—and Furina had teased him in the store for that purchase, asking if he should get a maid’s outfit as well, but he was once more glad for the purchase. The thick dust he found on the shelves would have immediately clogged the more modern, disposable ones in a heartbeat.
Elsewhere in the house, Neuvillette could hear Furina vocalizing along with the music and could hear the old floors creaking as she danced. Smiling to himself, Neuvillette got to work.
Sweaty and covered in dust, Neuvillette stepped into the kitchen and found that Furina had cleaned up their food. She had cleaned a portion of the counter—only a portion—and put their food there, the containers in a neat line from smallest to largest.
Neuvillette’s brows rose. She must have really been putting off doing the cleaning if she was willing to organize their food by size. Shaking his head, he unlocked the back door in the kitchen and walked back out on the back patio.
The back stairs needed a new coat of paint, or maybe needed to be replaced altogether, but Neuvillette had known about that. Still, to see it in person and not through the camera of the realtor’s phone felt strange.
At the bottom of the steps was a concrete patio that had seen better days, and Neuvillette had no idea what he might do to make it look less…wretched. Perhaps he’d ask the handymen or the contractors he would call to make some of the fixes at the house.
There was no back porch, just a small stoop, and Neuvillette carefully climbed down and looked out over the swaying grasses. A part of him considered tackling the yard situation himself but he also knew that that, as Furina would say, was the devil talking.
From what the realtor had said, the entire property had fallen into disarray since 1996. It had been purchased by several other people since, but for the most part it seemed strangely undisturbed, as if no one wanted to even cut the grass.
Which was strange, since the house didn’t seem particularly bad off. So why was the yard?
A playful breeze tugged on his hair and Neuvillette was abruptly reminded of why he had gone outside. He carefully patted himself down, wrinkling his nose behind his mask when puffs of dust were blown away. From his initial walk-through of the house when he met the realtor to get the key, most of the rooms hadn’t seemed so bad—and if it was that bad, he wouldn’t have heard Furina singing cheerfully along to her music and would have instead heard her squealing and complaining.
It was just, for whatever reason, that particular room.
Reasonably free of the worst of the dust, Neuvillette climbed the stairs back into the house. His mask went into the brown paper bag that they were using as trash and he tried not to think about the fact that it was nearly completely gray from the dust.
The water worked—though the house was ancient, or so the realtor claimed, the plumbing and electrical work were all modern and up to code. The building inspectors— inspectors , plural, because Neuvillette had hired one but so had Furina without telling him, leading to a very awkward situation when they both got calls about the other inspector—both confirmed it. And though he shouldn't wash himself completely since there was so much more cleaning to do, something in Neuvillette relaxed when the water ran clear. He scrubbed himself up to his elbows and dried himself with a roll of paper towels that he’d purchased from the store earlier that day.
Without Furina hovering over him or chattering in his ear, Neuvillette ate the rest of his stir fry and helped himself to some of the black pepper beef and the plain rice. None of it tasted quite the same as his and Furina’s favorite place in the city and he let himself feel a brief moment of homesickness. The food was… good , but it just wasn’t the same.
Perhaps it was for the best that it didn’t and that it was such a long drive to get into the main part of town. He had the feeling that he would have spent way more time and mora than he should have if it had tasted exactly the same.
Neuvillette put his chopsticks back down on a folded paper towel and walked back into the main area of the house. The floorboards creaked and he stopped a moment before Furina leaped out from behind the wall, her hands in the air. “Boo!”
“Furina,” he said and she pouted. “Perhaps next time you try to scare me, do it in a place where the floorboards don’t creak.”
Furina wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, this house is so noisy . I don’t know how you’ll ever sleep here.”
Most nights, Neuvillette slept very well, actually. And without the noise pollution from the city, he imagined that he would sleep even better. His road was a quiet thing, with only a few houses on it before it abruptly turned, almost as if the person drawing it had hit a straightedge, and he was fairly certain that his nearest neighbor was several minutes’ drive away.
It would be peaceful, even in an old and creaky house.
Neuvillette needed peace.
“We’ll find out in a few days,” Neuvillette murmured. “Is there something wrong?’
Furina shook her head. “Just taking a break,” she said. “I dusted everything upstairs.” Which meant that she dusted most things and Neuvillette would need to go back and double-check. “Have you decided which room would be yours?”
“Not yet,” Neuvillette told her. “I was going to wait a bit. I’m still working on the study.”
Immediately, Furina perked up. “Oh?” she asked. “I wanna see.”
Neuvillette picked up another mask and slipped it on over his nose and mouth, then slipped his goggles over it. As Furina watched—because she wouldn’t help , since she wasn’t cleaning the study—he untied the bag from around the bristles of the new broom he’d bought and grabbed a dustpan.
“That bad?” she asked sympathetically.
“That bad,” Neuvillette agreed. “But it can be great, I think.”
She bounced along behind him, making the old floorboards creak and groan. Neuvillette was glad that she seemed to be in such a good mood. He knew that deep down, she was upset that he was moving.
In some ways, he really couldn’t blame her.
Still, Furina gasped when they walked in. “Oh, Neuvillette, I’m so jealous!”
The shelves gleamed, a few damaged and faded but nothing that—as he understood the process—some sanding, stain, and varnish couldn’t fix. “The paint could use some work,” he mused. “And so far the floors seem alright.”
“Maybe add a rug there,” Furina pointed. “Maybe a settee there, and your desk there.” She spun around, her arms out. “There’s so much space!”
“I think it used to be the parlor room,” Neuvillette mused. “Or a place to entertain guests. It seems like it.”
Furina smirked at him. “Now there won’t be any more piles of books on the ground, right? Now that there is probably more than enough space for all of them?” she teased. When they had shared a house in college, she had tripped over his textbooks exactly once and had never let him live it down. The fact that she had been drunk and the books had been in his room had been deemed irrelevant in her mind, he guessed. Alcohol poisoning could do that to a person.
“You tripping over my books was never my fault,” Neuvillette told her, even though he already knew her response. It was a standard interaction with them, something that Neuvillette found comforted him to a surprising degree. It was familiar, and in turn soothing in its familiarity.
Something tense in him uncoiled slightly.
Furina struck a pose and then a gust of wind sucked at the window and she squeaked, skipping aside. The piles of dust that Neuvillette had just evicted from the shelves swirled on the ground and settled with a sigh. “Brr!” Furina complained. “I know it’s stuffy in here, but did you need to leave the window open? The heat might get out.”
“I didn’t,” Neuvillette said slowly. He paused. Did he? The middle window was cracked, open only a few inches. It was something that he’d do, on a window he’d choose if he wanted to let in fresh air, but he couldn’t recall doing so.
Then again, he hadn’t been paying much attention. The thick mask and goggles made his face feel warm and all the moving around had made him sweat beneath his shirt, even if he had rolled it up to his elbows.
Honestly, the breeze was quite welcome and he didn’t mind it, even if Furina—who was thin and tiny and always, always cold—complained.
“Nope,” Furina said, carefully putting the heels of her palms, then the sides of her hands on the lip of the window. The window slid closed with a satisfying thump.
Neuvillette looked at the window. As the realtor had said, the windows were newer, set in the old frames from over a century ago. Though he was no expert in construction or windows, Neuvillette was sure that someone somewhere had probably spent a small fortune getting custom windows to fit.
Just to annoy Furina—and to satisfy his own curiosity—Neuvillette slid another window up and leaned out. The wind ruffled his hair and tugged playfully on his braid, bringing with it the crisp scent of a cool fall afternoon. Even though he had just been outside in the backyard, the novelty of it—without the smell of smoke or exhaust or the general grime of a large city—was refreshing.
In the distance, as he had guessed, he could see a small slice of the riverbank. There were a few children playing there, distance rendering their forms little more than human-shaped blobs as they chased each other around. He wasn’t one for children but the sight still made him smile as he ducked back inside.
“Rude,” Furina said, prancing in place with her arms crossed over her chest. “So cold!”
Neuvillette ducked back inside and closed the window with a satisfying thump. “Dusting and sweeping should warm you up,” he told her. “And I’ve been told that the second and third floors tend to be the warmest parts of the house.”
Wrinkling her nose, Furina struck a dramatic pose again. “Me? Work?”
“Weren’t you working earlier?” Neuvillette teased.
Furina smacked his arm and squeaked when it released a puff of dust. “Eew!”
Eew was right. Neuvillette shivered. “I may need to dust again.”
“You might,” Furina agreed, skittering backwards as if afraid to be contaminated. “I’m suddenly much less jealous now. You have fun with that.” Then she scampered off, the floorboards creaking cheerfully beneath her steps.
He listened to her climb the steps and then trip at the top. She squeaked and then cried “weeh!” when she bumped into something else. Then she yelled through the empty house, “don’t laugh at me!”
The floorboards creaked as she walked down the hall to do whatever she was working on. Though she complained, he knew that she was a hard worker.
And he knew that she didn’t have paint or the supplies to paint anything so she couldn’t really go crazy with decorations.
Speaking of painting…
Neuvillette looked around the room again. Despite the thick layers of dust, most of the house was modern and showed signs of renovation though it wasn’t clear when exactly it had happened. Even the realtor didn’t seem to know, which had seemed rather odd. But then, it was a quiet house in a quiet town that wasn’t exactly rural but wasn’t not rural.
Then there was the whole business about the road being nearly abandoned. He’d done his research and knew that there used to be a church somewhere down the street, and several houses back in the very early days of the little town tucked between the mountains. Over time, the church had moved to a more convenient location as the town grew and slowly, the communities that had once been at the center of town faded out.
All of the houses were old, built in the old styles; one of them, Neuvillette’s closest “neighbor”, was barely standing. He had seen a sign on the front, faded from the sun and tucked in a protective plastic sleeve, that looked like a letter to condemn the building.
His house in particular, one of the farthest from the center of town, had changed hands several times. It was rebuilt sometime in the early 1900’s, though the realtor hadn’t known much more than that. Several people owned it but very few ever lived in it until Neuvillette, despite having updated amenities.
Furina and her sister Focalors had been suspicious. Over several video calls with the realtor, Furina had ambushed Neuvillette by letting herself into his condo and then ambushing the call itself. Though she loved playing the part of an airheaded socialite, she was terrifying when she chose to be and Neuvillette had to commend the realtor for not immediately showing her fear when Furina began to ask questions.
If the house is renovated, why does no one live there?
If the area is so safe, why is there no one there?
If everything is just as picture perfect as you claim, why is no one there?
“It’s just an old superstition,” the realtor had said with a high, nervous laugh. Her smile looked like the creepy ones you’d see on the mannequins in the stores that sold teenage clothes. Wild grins that were stretched too wide, that looked demonically happy, almost as if they had gone from happy to terrified. “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts, monsieur?”
It was just the premise of the scary movies that Furina hated but insisted on watching anyway. The ones where she would end up basically in Neuvillette’s lap, sobbing into his neck that she wanted to keep watching yet was unable to look at the screen.
A family moves into a new house.
Turns out it’s haunted.
The family tries to stick it out; the hauntings get worse.
They leave, or the demon is exorcized. They celebrate; everyone lives happily ever after.
Neuvillette snorted and grabbed the broom again. Ridiculous.