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ceilidho · 1 year ago

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prompt: (loosely based on Brahms from The Boy) you buy a house. you start to suspect you're not alone in it. [PART 1] tw: death of a parent, someone living in your house

Lightness; there were cracks in the floorboards and light glittering up from beneath them, which is what you first notice about the house.

It would be poetic if it meant anything. Instead, you are forced to pry the planks of wood out one by one at dawn when your fingers are trembling with exhaustion and your clipped nails throb—and, of course, there’s nothing remarkable beneath where the light shines through.

A piece of glass from a picture frame—all right, so you wonder how a piece of glass the size and width of your hand gets caught beneath the floor with the ashes of the photo once held behind it, but it’s half-six o’clock and you’re still yawning from the long drive the day before—catches a glint of light, and, well, you sigh at the blood welling over your nails from having pried off the floorboards with your bare hands.

You’ll replace the boards later. Maybe bandage your hand.

It’s so quiet outside this early. Everything smells just as it should.

It had taken years of scrimping and saving, storing every nickel and penny away in your piggybank to buy your first house. The foreclosure process takes about ten months, every second during which your nails bite into your palms when you close your fists. Your entire life savings goes into the downpayment. It quite literally takes your bank account, holds it upside down, and shakes until every coin falls out.

It’s yours though. A house all to yourself after years of living in apartments—you’ve spent decades living out of a suitcase, your parents changing apartments every year almost, never settling in one place. Buying a house wasn’t a nice-to-have so much as a physical necessity for you.

It’s an old house—plenty of character, as the real estate lady charmingly describes it when you showed you the place. You don’t have the money quite yet to replace the old windows, repair the drywall, brick up the chimney that you won’t use, or change the flooring, but since it’s just you, you don’t mind taking your time. The previous owners hadn’t really kept the place up; there’s even a panel at the back of the closet in your room leading into the walls that needs to be replaced.

Later, when folding your clothes into new drawers that smell of new wood and old wood, you startle, thinking you’d packed your mother’s underwear along with your own; you thought you’d donated everything after she died. The thought is nauseating (a cold sweat breaks out) until you recognize the pattern on the blue cotton as your own and you crumple the fabric between your fingers for a second, dried blood and all.

Dawn is rising outside, emptying out the house until it’s just you and the fifteen pairs of underwear you’d packed days ago. Everything else is sitting out on the patio in cardboard boxes. When you finally get the rest out where it can breathe, morning has settled into midday.

When you finish putting your clothes away, you’re careful not to move for another few minutes until your hands stop shaking and your jaw unclenches. For breakfast, you fix up an omelet with spinach and a glass of cranberry juice. A friend calls not long later, but they mainly speak about their husband and how the living room will look once it was stripped of the gaudy floral wallpaper and repainted. Your friend hasn’t even seen the house yet, only pictures of the house from when you had searched it on Google Maps and tentatively held the idea glass-like in your head for several days.

Your friend says in a voice molasses thick, “I’ll visit as soon as you’re tucked in down there.” It makes you rub your nose against your sleeve.

The pictures online had been splotchy and dim, barely recognizable when held against the lightness of the house full-formed. Your friend had sent you off with cream and lilac paint swatches, wooden coasters, and a copy of Ulysses before you had packed up the last of your things into the back of your car and the sky had been aglow with sunset. A large sunset that dribbled down the horizon and slid all slippery smooth into twilight. Your friend’s face had been lovingly shadowed in their goodbye, the sort of shadow that cut her jaw just so, and made one seem so private and longing. Like an instance of specific longing.

It’s a good morning though, and you bite the inside of your cheek through the whole phone call, not stumbling over frequent ‘I love you’s and ‘I already miss you’s, but feeling like maybe you should. Anyway, your friend hangs up long before you know whether to carry those thoughts out.

Then it’s still again in your unfurnished little bedroom—in one corner, there’s a rolled up carpet and end table that you’d brought in earlier, but they sit there unaltered and you think that maybe later you’ll get around to doing something with them.

No one else calls while you eat breakfast, cutting the omelet into irregular triangles and putting enough hot sauce to make your eyes water. Which they do, but it’s good. After eating, you grab a mug out of one of the boxes on the patio to make a cup of instant coffee.

You fix the floorboards back after, nailing them back in place while sipping the lukewarm coffee that is still so, so good. So, so good to you because it’s early, so on one hand it’s comforting, habitually speaking, but also because the house is so new and old that sometimes you breathe in and feel lightheaded, or like your heart might tremble so violently that it’ll reduce itself to dust.

So, coffee is good. Keeps you steady on your feet when you’re climbing back up the stairs to lug more boxes into the bedroom. Boxes of books you didn’t want to unpack, so they sit under a beam of sunlight in front of the one window in the room and you sit yourself down next to it, curling your legs underneath you and resting your head against the box.

Strange, that the house is so warm when it’s nearly the end of October and it’s not like this city is all that different from the one you left. That the shard of glass you’d found beneath the floorboards could fill you with such a dizzying amount of melancholy (you still have it in the pocket of your sweater, which had deep pockets, deep pockets that apparently you use to carry around pieces of glass); again, though, the house is so warm and your bones are oozing out onto the carpet you unroll. Everything in you feels molten and fluid.

Your spirit roars into the light of this new town with its new air, its new terrain, its new immediacy. Stepping out into the street outside the house, you feel every nerve in your body tremble in the realization of this new sensory landscape. Your fingertips buzz—you could reach out and touch every surface you pass: the wood-grain of a park bench, the sleek chrome of a chain-link fence.

The town feels unreal in a sensuous way. When you go out to explore the town after unpacking the majority of your belongings, you can’t help being drawn down streets and up alleyways, eyes trailing over the russet bricked houses and hedges dotting the front lawns.

On the corner of a street, nearly three blocks from your house, there’s a café with houseplants almost spilling out of the door and windows; you duck inside and order a coffee and a bagel before tucking yourself into a corner by the window.

On the street across from the café, a woman in a yellow raincoat walks by.

“Drip coffee?”

You look up from your seat, startled almost by the voice, at a young man. He has a flare of freckles and an unsure smile.

“Yes, sorry,” you mumble, taking the mug from him and tucking yourself back against the window in almost the same moment.

To be sitting in plain daylight without company or a book or your phone out in front of you feels absurdly barren. Anyone might walk by and perceive the desperation that seems to pour off you. Even the few other occupants in the café are occupied with something or other, eyes pulled down to their tables or to someone sitting across from them.

For a spell, walking home in the daze of the possibility of new peace, you feel light; to be poised on the verge of new possibilities and peering out over the edge, cautiously but with a ray of hope. Even the air feels fresh.

The lightness, of course, cannot last long.

Days before you left, someone told you that it’s common to have nightmares in a new house. You prove them right on the first night.

In the wake of a bad dream, you pad into the kitchen, illuminated only by the moonlight, for a glass of water, reduced to only the silvering edges of your skin in the dark room.

Occasionally it happens that you dream of your mom, in her blue jeans and raincoat again, standing outside the old coffee house from back home. She always looks well rested, and that always stings somehow—it makes you feel like you’re unraveling, even in a dream. She never says anything to you or even looks your way, but you know that she knows you’re there, and that dawdling energy, obvious indifference, is all a measured hurt. You dream of your mom staring off into the red-gold distance, honey-gold herself, irreducible in this place.

Then, you wake up, panting and squeezing your eyes shut.

You pour yourself a glass of water, but the tears don’t stop, coming out of you like a divine flooding.

The two of you hadn’t been on speaking terms in the months before her death. In fact, you hadn’t even known she was dying. You remember you had an argument almost a year before, but for the life of you, you can’t remember what it was about. It was that inconsequential. That inconsequential and still she let it simmer and fester and didn’t bother to tell you that she was dying until it was too late.

You scrub your eyes with the back of your hand, smearing the salty tears across your skin. In the moonlight, your grief seemed inescapable, layered under the lowest level of your flesh. All the loneliness of lonely dwelling catching in your throat, bursting out like the last release of breath of a woman beneath the swell of a cresting wave. The moon is not a comfort; the sky rounded in with its indifference, wholly incapable of putting any sentiment to rest. You feel languid in this old grief.

Unable to bear being inside, you venture out onto the porch for a bit, closing only the screen door behind you. There’s a single light still on in your bedroom, the house otherwise dark. You sit in the cool breeze until your tears dry.

There is something entirely relaxing about watching a breeze push all of the trees to one side—like the world moves with one breath, one thought. Back when you lived in the city, you hadn’t lived in such close proximity to nature, used to the concrete landscape. In the city, everything seemed to exist at opposing speeds and modes of existence—everything perpetually at odds.

You stare out into the street and drink your water, leisurely pacing around your front lawn. Just taking in the feeling of being settled for once. It’s a safe neighborhood. It’s an old house, a real fixer upper, but it’s a neighborhood where you can just walk around at night.

It takes a while to unwind, to shake off the nightmare. You know it finally has when a yawn forces its way out of you and your eyes water again, from exhaustion this time. Draining your glass, you turn around to make your way back inside. You pause. Your foot hovers in place.

Then, in the shadowy depths of your house, you think you see something move again.

#simon ghost riley #ceil writing #cod mw2 #cod x reader #simon riley x you #simon ghost riley x reader #cod simon riley #ghost x reader #ghost/reader #ghost cod

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neverenoughmarauders · 4 days ago

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Sirius' big mistake

I have to ask the same question as @goldenlionprince: Am I sorry for this? Yes, yes I am. It's that damn plot again... So demanding...

As you will no doubt remember from the stress/heartbreak @goldenlionprince brought to you in the last ficlet, Sirius and James have had an argument. This piece picks up shortly after Sirius leaves James' flat. All of this is part of @sorenphelps wonderful The Bodyguard AU.

‘You’re fired.’

The words still ring in Sirius’ ears as he leaves James’ flat. That evening, Sirius doesn’t go to his own place, which he has barely set foot in these last few months anyways. Instead, he walks the streets of London until sunlight. It’s not like he needs much sleep, and the little sleep he should get would have escaped him. This way, he hopes that by the time he collapses into bed, his head will be quiet. Quiet and free of James Potter.

Fired?

James had some bloody nerve to fire him. It was all the more infuriating for James’ suggestion—nay, accusation—that Sirius cared more about his job than James. James was his bloody job. For all his intelligence, his employer—his former employer, Sirius corrected with another surge of anger—was really thick sometimes.

Thinking he might get some breakfast, Sirius walked into PAUL, only then realising that he’d walked into the branch which was conveniently located by the cathedral by the same name. A sandwich (no cranberries or turkey this time, thank you very much) and coffee in hand, he took a seat outside. This afforded him a clear view to Temple Bar. They used to display the heads of traitors on spikes here, and Sirius finds that matches his mood perfectly.

However, once Sirius has let the food sink a little, and the coffee has helped clear his mind, he realises that his behaviour is, perhaps, a little unprofessional. James still needs a bodyguard. Sirius isn’t petty. He will keep James safe until Kingsley can step in. In time, James should be able to find a more permanent replacement.

Postponing his journey home Sirius therefore heads for the underground. He’s not a big fan of taking the tube, but he can’t afford to leave James like this for much longer. Thankfully, James is not a morning person, so Sirius doesn’t expect him to have left for work yet. He will find James at his flat. His own bed—the one that is a long, safe distance from James Potter—will just have to wait.

Maybe Sirius is less alert than usual, his mind preoccupied with the idea of seeing James again after their fallout. Maybe there was nothing that could have prepared him as he pressed his finger to the keypad. After all, there are only three people in the world who can operate this. Only three sets of fingerprints allow access to James’ flat. So when the door swings open, Sirius is prepared to see James, probably bent over his laptop sending a couple of emails before he leaves for work. What he is not expecting is to see the flat turned upside down. The sofa standing on its side, the table now only splinters, shards of glass from the vase breaking under his feet as he enters the scene of a crime.

What crime though?

Sirius is trained for this, conditioned to keep his cool: his heart steady, his mind clear, his body alert, his eyes observant. He knows he is looking for two things: assailants still roaming the flat, ready to attack, and a body—gravely injured or dead. Everything else are second-order concerns. Yet, he’s frozen, because his eyes refuse to search for James’ lifeless corpse.

James can’t be dead.

Sirius’ last words cannot have been the last thing he told the man that he - It just can’t!

‘I’ll be surprised if you survive until tomorrow.’

Why had he said that? What had he done?

Telling himself that he can push away the all-consuming fear, Sirius sets to work. If his hands are trembling, his vision blurred, his head racing and his body numb; if he stumbles ever so slightly on the upturned corner of the rug, nobody is there to see it.

Pushing open the door to James’ bedroom, his heart thumping violently against his ribs, his first thought is to scan the bed and floor. There is no body. Sirius lets out a breath he did not know he had been holding.

Yet, this is the start of the catastrophic events. James was sleeping when they came for him, that much is obvious. Two people, Sirius guesses, and they made one fatal mistake. They underestimated his tech nerd. The crutch on the floor tells Sirius that James grabbed the first thing within reach. James’ leg had long since healed but the latest run, the race up the stairs—and subsequent activity—had rendered it too sore and stiff. So they’d left the crutch within arm's length, just in case.

Crutch to the crotch, Sirius guesses, and had the situation not ended the way it must have, Sirius would have laughed. It was so typical James. But what else would have incapacitated guy number one, allowing James to jump out of bed and… what? Ram the other guy. It’s all educated guesses, but this happens to be Sirius’ area of expertise. In his mind’s eye, he can picture James, who would now be free of the two men. James would have rushed into the living room, wanting to get to the entrance. Sirius would have been able to tell James that the Death Eaters would have left a third man by the door, to prevent an escape should things not go to plan.

What did James do? He grabbed the vase, Sirius realises, chucked it at the person by the door. It was a spirited attempt, but even James must have realised it was futile.

James stood no chance. The two other Death Eaters would have recovered by now. Still, the state of the living room tells Sirius that James did not go down without a fight.

Of course not, James had been fighting for his life. He had been forced into a corner he was not equipped to navigate out from. This had been a situation those around James had predicted could happen. It had been what had driven James, desperate to be free and to live his life, to hire Sirius to begin with.

There was no more life to be led for James Potter. His bodyguard had failed him.

‘I’ll be surprised if you survive until tomorrow.’

All James had wanted was to be with him, and Sirius had blown him off… and left him to die. Because James is dead—or will be very soon. Sirius knows this. Death Eaters only ever take people for two purposes: either they have a use for them, or they need to get rid of them. James has been a relentless pain in their arse—the way only James can be—for months. They needed him gone.

Sirius staggers towards the bedroom again, because a voice in his numb brain is telling him there’s something of relevance there. It is hard, impossible even, to make anything out because his mind is filled with images of James.

James is grinning at him from the sofa, no longer upturned, and tells him to take his time in the shower, laptop balanced on his lap, his bad knee propped up on pillows. James flops down on the sofa next to him, wanting to interrogate- sorry, to question him, and they end up talking about dino nuggets. James, unable to sleep, joins him on the sofa, leans his body against him and later kisses Sirius.

Sirius had let James fall asleep that night, after they’d made out like teenagers. What he should have done was to undress him, have him right then and there, kiss every inch of his body and tell him just how much Sirius was in love with him. Back then he had still had a chance to tell James this. Now that is an opportunity he will never have again.

New memories assault Sirius more forcefully still as he re-enters the bedroom. James trying to hide his attempts to get at Voldemort; James wanting to show Sirius Rosier Sr being bullied by his wife; James and him, a tangle of sweat and rain and limbs and moans and kisses.

James cannot be gone.

Sirius is barely aware of making it to the en-suite. The ham and cheese sandwich from earlier forces its way out and into the loo. It’s a long time since anything made him vomit. It takes far more than a crushed skull or intestines that have been torn from the body to make Sirius be sick. Yet this is more than any man should be asked to stomach.

For a few moments longer, Sirius lets himself feel the pain. A howl escapes him, like an injured dog. Sirius Black is wounded and in ways he is not sure he can recover from.

James doesn’t even know his name. Didn’t know his name! A sob escapes Sirius as he makes the mental correction. James didn’t know that Sirius loved him. So fucking much.

‘I’ll be surprised if you survive until tomorrow.’

Another howl or sob or scream—Sirius isn’t quite sure which—escapes his lips. Sirius did this. He left James. And the last thing he did to the most important person in his life was to taunt him.

Please, Sirius finds himself begging there on the bathroom floor. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t be dead. Please, James, know that I love you.

Please forgive me.

But there’s nobody to hear his prayers. James will never hear him beg. Sirius had sworn it would be so, and now it had come true.

No more words. No more laughter. It is too cruel that Sirius will never hear James’ laugh again.

Nothing can undo the damage he has inflicted. James is gone. They’ve taken him, and in this moment, somewhere in London, they are either killing him, or disposing of his body.

Sirius Black has failed James Potter. There is nothing Sirius can do now. Or…

The bed.

Something stirs in Sirius’ mind. James was lying in his bed when they got to him. That means he couldn’t have opened the door to his murderers. Yet there is no sign of the door being broken or tampered with.

There are only three people with access to that door.

Sirius mind travelled back to where he’d started his morning. Temple bar. The gate of the traitors. He has a head to spike; a rat to sniff out; a man to punish cruelly. Inflicting pain upon the small, watery-eyed man may remove some of the near suffocating guilt; some of Sirius’ desire to hurt himself for having left James alone to be taken and -. No, Sirius needs to keep his eyes on the target. He has only one job now that the world has lost all meaning. That job is to hunt down the traitor Peter Pettigrew.

#james potter #Sirius Black #Prongsfoot #The Bodyguard AU #Bambibelle #I am sorry guys!#Sirius Black needs a hug #James Potter needs Sirius Black to pull himself together #Fanfic

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