Chapter Text
It wasn’t a matter of want to know, I needed to know. At night, flashes of strange things I couldn’t explain appeared in my dreams. There were strange sounds, music made from instruments I couldn’t name played in land too distant to see, and a name called out over and over again by a voice I couldn’t recognise.
These dreams kept my sleep thin and broken for months, and it was beginning to take a toll on my time awake. I was seeing things, spots of black haze in the corners of my eyes that disappeared when I turned my head. Hands of shadows reaching under doors, or scratching down windows, strange and unnatural beings that blurred the lines between reality and nightmare.
My work was slack, my mending broke within a day’s wear, my embroidery was messy, words almost illegible, and everything I tried to bake burnt. I was hoping someone would say something, anything, that would wake me from the never-ending daze, but I think they could see it too. There was darkness in my eyes, and across my face, a permanent look of not being all quite there that kept people away from me.
At supper I kept my head low. My cousins kept their eyes on their own plates, my aunt too. No one dared include me in conversation, lest I curse them with the darkness too. After, I cleared my plate and washed it slowly, relaxing my mind slightly with the motion of scrubbing the cloth against the plate slowly, in circular motions. The sound of the water splashing quietened the strange music in my mind, and the shimmering of the small waves catching the soft light of the sun, scared away the shadows.
‘Is everything alright?’
The moon had set quickly, or I had been washing for hours. Looking at my hands it was the latter that was the truth.
I turned, wiping my hands on my skirt to see my aunt, Jenny, looking at me with concern.
‘It’s been an awful while.’ She smiled, weakly, not wanting to press me too hard. ‘We were wondering where you were.’
I stared down at my wrinkled hands and flexed them. My skin was tight, and it felt like it was beginning to snap like threads as my bones bent into full extension.
Jenny cupped a warm hand on my cheek. We were near the same height now, blue eyes level with my own, thumb barely reaching my lower lashes, and yet I still felt infantile. I wanted so much to cry in that moment, to fall to my knees and weep until I shrank, and she could carry to the fireside and sing me to sleep, but I couldn’t move. I could only stand there and try my best to make sense of my mind, as thoughtless as it was.
‘I’m sorry,’ was the only phrase I could muster the thought to say, and so I said it twice more, not only to apologise to my aunt, but also to remind myself that, despite the haze that had engulphed me the last four months, I was still alive and in control of my body, if only my body.
‘It’s nae bother dear,’ Jenny sighed, placing her hand then on my hair, smoothing it gently. She looked over my face, closely inspecting each part of it. I wondered what she was looking for. A physical manifestation of my sudden melancholy perhaps? Or some scar that’s pain was keeping my spirit in torment?
Those thoughts kept me away from the truth or her looks. She was looking for any semblance in my face to her own.
She was lying when she whispered, ‘so much like him,’ under her breath. There was no way. No way at all. Whilst it was true that, given time, one could grow into the manner of their parents, especially one with as close a friendship to their father as I had, it was impossible for that nurture of override natures blessing of features.
‘You best come with me,’ Jenny sighed, a small smile curling the edges of her lips. ‘We’ve quite the surprise for you.’