#hannah grose. i remain a very happy woman.

[lovehurried]

@wasworthy​ said:    “ even the strongest heart gets broken. ” rest in mourning starters  •  accepting.

“Ah, are we speaking from experience here, Owen?” Hannah sets her cup of tea back down on the table, watching his back as he prepares lunch at one of the counters. Her smile is audible, though. “It certainly isn���t a stretch to imagine that there’s a trail of broken hearts from Bly to Paris and back again, thanks to you.”

[webgeekist]

I woke last night, and the beast had been there before me.  She placed my hand over your throat.  I’m not sure if she’s graced me with a warning, or if I stopped her before she could take you, but I can’t allow her to try again.  I can’t let her take you, too.

—

Jamie wasn’t surprised when she received the invitation.  The children may not remember her well, perhaps a passing memory as their uncle’s old friend, but he would have been sure to grant an opportunity in Flora’s wedding for a reassurance that they were thriving and happy, for a chance to see them again, even if they could hardly remember her.  And, perhaps most, for the opportunity to see what her wife’s sacrifice had provided his family, and that it, maybe, it was worth something.

The pain wasn’t in the invitation.  It was in the knowledge that Miles and Flora wouldn’t remember the very reason the invitation had been so important.  The children didn’t remember Dani at all.

Owen called her to ask if she would make it out.  He more than Henry was aware of what the past seven years had done, the significance of Flora’s chosen wedding date, entirely coincidental, and what attending any wedding at all might stir.  It had been but days after Vermont had granted the two of them some pseudo-legal way of putting their five year marriage to paper when Viola finally took Dani, when Dani had finally lost the battle to bear even her own weight, and the loss of that life had left Jamie sunk into the dirt, tending only to her plants.  For a while, Owen tried to keep tabs on her, knowing himself what it was like to grieve so deeply, but Jamie had shut him out after a while with the rest of the world.  Their calls were short, more of a welfare check than a conversation.

She didn’t want to go, if she were being honest, but she didn’t tell Owen that.  She suspected he didn’t have to hear it.  Hiding in grief was something they had both been good at, in their times.  So it again came as no surprise when, arriving late to the rehearsal dinner as she did, mid-toast to a girl at the head of the table who remembered him far better than the silver-haired new arrival at the very end, Owen stopped speaking.  What went through his mind as she took her seat was anyone’s guess, but Jamie thought in that moment that fear might have passed over his face.  She was aware of how time had changed her.  She paid it little care.  Time spent looking in reflections was time spent looking for something other than her own.

Reflections were things that traveled with her, but Jamie had searched for seven long years.  She was terrified of the idea that Dani would come home, find the apartment they shared empty, and never come back again.  She filled every basin with water as she went, begging the Lady of the Lake to follow her across a vast and wide country, an ocean and more removed from her home in the inky waters at Bly.

It was nice to see Flora so happy.  Jamie might not have stayed for the whole affair at all if the girl’s face didn’t seem so familiar in her love, and it allowed her to remember what that felt like.  It’s not that the memories faded.  It’s not that she didn’t keep them close.  It’s that in her grief and her emptiness, she imagined she knew what Dani felt like as the last of her days approached — there, but not.  Going through the motions of life without ever really feeling any of it.

She was so sure Dani had never meant to leave her so broken, understood why she had let Viola finally have control.  In the last weeks, she was so, so tired.  Jamie had tried so hard to bear both their weights, but the last of it— the heaviest of it— was beyond her, though she had tried with her whole heart.

Dani would never let her.

Into the night, she was surprised that she lingered.  Seated by a warm fireplace, listening to the stories she had missed in Flora’s life, smiling at stories about the adventures she and her soon-to-be-husband had already been on, blissfully unaware of the harrowing tale she had already participated in.

And then, they spoke of ghosts, and that was a subject that Jamie for all her quiet during the evening was particularly well versed in.

Owen and Henry looked briefly horrified, but...maybe this was why she came.  Maybe the opportunity to tell Flora the story of how she had been granted the opportunity to fall so in love was exactly why she was there.

They were surely afraid she would tell this story, and Flora would remember, but Jamie would never disturb her hard-won happiness.  She would tell the story, change some names around, but leave the indelible message of the tragic tale intact.

And as she told it, she found the remembering pleasant.  Not that she relished telling the story of Hannah Grose’s tragic end, of Owen’s sorrow, or of Henry’s near-death.  She wished as she told the tale that she could change any detail of Dani’s fate at all, but her memory had not been granted the gift of the weathering of time.  She remembered it all as print on the pages of her mind, solid as stone for the rest of her days.

The hour when she finished was late, but she could not regret the telling.  Something inside her felt lighter, as if the story itself had been her own personal beast in the jungle, and telling it had somehow exorcised it.

Owen was the one to usher away her gathered audience, wishing perhaps to stave off too many questions.  She’d been careful to obscure so many details, but the possibility always remained — and Jamie had risked — that one of the children would remember the name she finally gave to the au pair at the end of her story.

Dani.  It was a name they once knew, and had long forgotten.  But Jamie could never, and if they had nothing of the woman who gave them a chance at the happy ending their elders would never have, the children would have this story and Dani’s name.

Jamie hadn’t known what to expect of the gathered crowd’s reactions, but Flora’s simple statement later had been right in a way she had never considered.

Love stories and ghost stories were the same things.  

Their story — their wedding gift to Flora, in a way — was the only way she could keep Dani alive past her own memory, living in more than the moments that were silly or dumb, or made her cry, and that she kept close and dear in her waking mind and in her dreams.

She stayed past when she expected to be able to bear, through the ceremony and into the reception, lighter and happier than she had been in years, and felt a warmth she couldn’t explain.  Something was easier, comfortable, present.  Maybe, Jamie reasoned, she was simply gratified that the little girl she and Dani had once known had grown up into a magnificent young woman, in love and loving, and at peace.

Something of that peace was her own now, a part of whatever the rest of Jamie’s story would be.

The water in the tub was warm and fresh, and in the basin, it stood clean and clear.  Jamie searched those reflections for her lover one last time.  This was her routine.  She would prepare, dress in silk and make herself as pretty as someone sleeping might care to be, and she would sleep by the door opened just a crack.  Sometimes in waking, the remnants of her dream would linger, and she would be fooled into thinking someone was in the room with her.

She smiled softly as she settled into her chair, wishing it were so, and drifted into sleep.

—

“Here’s the thing.  You’re my best friend, and the love of my life.”  Dani’s face was so open in that moment, shining in soft light, the glint of gold held aloft in Jamie’s hand, surrounded by their tiny kitchen and every fledgling plant they cared for.  This was her favorite memory, her best part.  She would live in this moment forever, if she could.

“And I don’t know how much time we have left.  But whatever it is, I want to spend it with you.”

So precious little.  So very much.  What ended up being so many years at the time would have felt like an eternity, but Jamie had lived past the ends of infinity, and been left alone in the dark.

She was so reluctant to break the script of this precious memory, having clung so tightly to it in its exact form for years to preserve it.  She’d always been afraid that saying something else, anything else, would begin an inevitable end.  

All memory fades, eventually.  She had tried so, so hard to make sure Dani’s never would.

“I want this.  So, so much.  All I want with you, Dani, is more time.  We deserved so much more time.”

The woman in her dream paused, and smiled so wide Jamie was left confused for a moment.  Their proposal had been so emotional, so filled with watery gazes and happy tears.  This smile was different, but Dani’s eyes were no less watery.

And blue.  Both of them, the blue she remembered from when they first met.

“I’ve been waiting so long for you to finally say that.”

For a long moment, Jamie simply stared, but she couldn’t bear it any longer.  They crashed forward, embracing each other desperately as they had at the lake so many years ago, and the woman in her arms was so warm, so real that Jamie had difficulty believing that she was dreaming anymore.

“I’ve always been here, Jamie,” the lilt of her voice fluttered across the gardener’s heart, just as her fingers and her warm touch did the same.  “Because you have loved me, I will always be here.  And because I loved you, you’re always with me.”

—-

When she woke, the sun had just begun to make its way across the sky.  She was groggy, still a little tired but….happy.  And warm.

Warm that radiated from a single point on her shoulder.

She turned, as she so often did after waking, as she so often hoped in the space between sleep and full consciousness to catch a glimpse of something she longed for, and when the hand lifting from her shoulder, its ring finger bearing a band that matched her own, came into view her breath caught.

“Dani…”

The morning light was so soft, and Dani looked somehow more ethereal than any Bly ghost had.  Faded, but her face was bright and clear, her blue eyes shone with unshed tears, as beautiful as the day they had met.

“I’m here, Jamie.”  The sound of her name carried on Dani’s trembling voice nearly sent her to tears, but she refused.  She wanted — needed — to see clearly.

“You’ve come back to me.”

She smiled.  “I never left.”

“But I’ve missed you.  So, so much.”

“You held to our memories so tightly, Jamie.  You clung to them like letting them go meant letting me go.  I’ve been here, waiting in your dreams.  But you needed to remember.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?  Why did you let me cling to them?”

Dani toted her head.  “You carried so much of my burden in life, Jamie.  This was the last.  We were so lucky to have each other for so many days, but we always knew why our time in life together would be short.  That was always our gift for Flora, and in telling our story, you’ve finally delivered it.”

She could feel the truth of those words in the telling.  She’d somehow known all along.  It was why she was all the way out there to begin with.

But with the lightness, a sudden emptiness.  As if she’d forgotten the hole in her heart, she was suddenly reminded by the clenching of it.

Jamie’s tears finally broke.  “How long must I continue without you?”

A watery, ghostly gaze might have broken, as well.  It was hard to tell between tears.

“Would you like company?”

“What?”

“Would you like company?  While you wait?”

Jamie hesitated only a moment before she asked her final question, her whole heart in it.  “Can you stay with me?”

Dani smiled sweetly, but continued to fade in the rising light.  “One night at a time, Love.  We’ll take it one night at a time.  But after that, I promise Jamie, we’ll have forever.  And in the between, remember my note.  Remember what I said.”

Dani faded finally, the daylight taking her, and Jamie was left immediately longing for the next night to come.

But the words in Dani’s final note, suddenly, meant so much more than it had before, and she knew she could make it between the dreams alone, just a little longer.

—

I woke last night, and the beast had been there before me.  She placed my hand over your throat.  I’m not sure if she’s graced me with a warning, or if I stopped her before she could take you, but I can’t allow her to try again.  I can’t let her take you, too.

But I swear to you, Jamie, I will remember.  I will remember your face and your warmth and your heart for as long as you live, and longer.  I will not let time weather what we were to just the shape of it.  What we had is made of stronger stuff than that.

I loved you completely, Jamie.  And you loved me the same.

Live, for the both of us.

[aion-rsa]

The Haunting of Bly Manor: The Poignant Tale of Hannah Grose

https://ift.tt/3loTz7C

The following contains spoilers for every episode of THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR.

“I liked your story”, a grown-up Flora tells an older Jamie in The Haunting of Bly Manor’s finale. “But I think you set it up wrong just in the beginning. You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story.” Almost right. The Haunting of Bly Manor is two love stories: the centre-stage romance between Bly’s au pair and gardener Dani and Jamie, and the unrealised romance between housekeeper and chef, Hannah and Owen. 

Both are tragic tales. Dani and Jamie’s marriage was unfairly – like too many lesbian love stories on screen – cut off in its prime, while Hannah and Owen’s relationship was stopped before it could even begin. Before the pair had confessed their true feelings to each other, Hannah was killed. Not that she realised.

“You went off a cliff and you just kept going”

That’s the thing about living in a haunted house: when you become a ghost, very little changes. The rules of Bly Manor show that until a ghost’s facial features fade away, they look just like the living, can make themselves seen by the living, and are able to physically touch objects and people – hence, for instance, Viola being able to choke Peter to death.

Viola’s story, in which her intractable resolve to remain at Bly keeps the spirit of anybody else who died there prisoner on the grounds, also shows how the personality of the living can bring to bear on the rules of their afterlife. Hannah’s denial of her own death not only made her continuously visible to the living, but also ‘dream’ different outfits and accessories, creating the illusion that she was still one of them. 

In truth, Hannah Grose died on the day that Dani arrived at Bly. Minutes before Flora brought the new au pair to meet Mrs Grose, Hannah was pushed into a well by a possessed Miles, broke her neck, and died. The person who greets Dani and takes her inside the house is Hannah’s ghost, who then lives alongside Dani, Jamie, Owen and the children for a week or more after her death, not accepting that she too is caught in Bly’s peculiar “glue trap”. Incidentally, Mrs Grose may have the same name as the illiterate, exposition-tool housekeeper from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, but she’s an entirely new take on the character. 

The Altar of the Dead

Hannah’s denial lays the ground for The Haunting of Bly Manor’s strongest instalment by far, episode five ‘The Altar of the Dead.’ In it, ghost-Hannah slips from year to year and memory to memory, not cognisant of her murder. Her subconscious gives her a series of clues to prod her to the realisation that she’s no longer alive, but Hannah, played with beautiful sensitivity by T’Nia Miller (recently seen in Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years), refuses to accept it and fails to grasp the significance of the repeated motifs and phrases connected to her final moments of life.  

Phrases such as “Honestly, Hannah,” which were the last words she heard spoken before being pushed into the well and dying. They were spoken by her killer, 10-year-old Miles possessed by the ghost of Peter Quint. In episode five, we hear the words spoken by Peter on four occasions: after seeing Hannah spying on him and Rebecca in the children’s schoolroom (“Honestly, Hannah. You should give the vacuum a rest.”), a possessed-by-Peter Miles says them while walking away after Hannah berates him for smoking, ghost-Peter says them once again when she sees him standing with Miles by the well, (“Honestly, Hannah, do you ever get tired of being such a bore?”), before Miles finally repeats them as he pushes Hannah to her death.

The repetition appears to be Hannah’s subconscious reminding her of what’s happened, just the same as the distinctive crack she keeps seeing on walls around the estate. Appearing in the kitchen, in the chapel, and in Bly’s closed-down wing, the crack is the final image Hannah sees before death, hence its recurrence in the days immediately afterwards as her mind tries to nudge her towards accepting what’s happened. 

“Live a little”

There are other hints too. Listen carefully to episode five’s dialogue and the number of references to life, living and being alive are almost comically frequent in light of what we come to learn about Hannah. Sitting next to Owen (iZombie‘s Rahul Kohli) at the bonfire, Hannah is told that “any of us could die at any moment” and implores her to come with him to Paris. When she mockingly asks what she’d do in Paris, he tells her “eat croissants, drink good wine… live.” Earlier, in one of the many iterations of Owen’s job interview scene, he (therefore: she) says he’s “learning a lot about being alive.” After Peter Quint chastises her for spying on him, he tells Hannah to “live a little.”

In the chapel, Rebecca (therefore: Hannah) says she’s never felt “so alive”, and is told “there’s a difference between feeling good and feeling alive.” After Hannah’s marriage breaks up, Charlotte offers her the housekeeper role as a live-in position, offering her the chance to stay at Bly “forever” if she needs to. Again in the chapel, Charlotte tells Hannah she lit a candle for her (in truth for her cheating husband Sam) and it’s remarked on that remembrance candles aren’t lit for the living. 

On a second watch, the dramatic irony is overwhelming. Even the characters can see it. When Hannah tells Peter-Miles off for smoking, she asks him “Do you want to die a horrible, choking death?” and Peter-Miles laughs, because thanks to Viola, that’s exactly how he did die. And, while this may simply be period texture, when Dani leaves a ‘tucked-away’ Flora sleeping in bed and walks into the kitchen, Owen is midway through trying to convince Hannah to go with him to a Patrick Swayze concert. Now, can you really bring up Swayze in the context of an alive person/dead person romance and not expect viewers’ minds to think of 1990’s Ghost? (Yeah, maybe you can. I’ll give you that one.)

It’s not just in episode five; there are clues throughout. When Dani meets Hannah in the chapel on the day of Owen’s mother’s funeral, Hannah explains away her absence by saying that Owen understands that funerals are for the living. Of course, due to Viola’s curse on the manor, no spirits who die there are able to pass beyond its grounds, so there’s no question of Hannah leaving to attend a funeral in the village. When Hannah revisits the memory of her telling the children to slow down and stop running or they’ll “break their bloody skulls,” can it be a coincidence that she’s speaking as somebody with a broken skull? Imagery of her death is everywhere.

Read more

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Hannah’s denial is partly caused by the person who broke that skull: young Miles, whom she loves and repeatedly insists to memory-Owen is, “a good boy” though (dramatic irony klaxon) he “hasn’t exactly been himself” of late. Ignorant of Bly Manor’s ghosts (who, until Dani arrives, bringing her own ghost and trauma-related sensitivity to the afterlife with her, had only been seen by Miles and Flora), Hannah doesn’t know the deal. Until she witnesses Peter being dragged away by Viola as part of her episode five psychic travels, Hannah hadn’t seen the ghosts, despite having spent years cleaning up Viola’s muddy footprints. Hannah therefore didn’t realise that Miles was possessed by Peter, and so allowed him to lead her into the woods for the “surprise” of seeing her own dead body. 

“You just need to look down, Hannah”

Why, when Peter Quint realised his situation within minutes of being murdered, did Hannah have such trouble accepting her fate? The easy answer is: because it’s a TV-show twist-reveal to provide a The Sixth Sense-style ‘aha’ moment. Character-wise, the explanation comes from what the role of Bly Manor housekeeper means to Hannah, and the show’s thematic concern with the search for peace. When Hannah’s husband left her for another woman, Bly Manor became her permanent home. When Peter cruelly threatened her with dismissal, she insisted that Bly was not just her job but her home. Jamie’s voiceover leading into episode five tells us that “The housekeeper would always find her way back to peace in her daily routine.” Hannah is happy at Bly, and tells Dani as much in the chapel. The sense of purpose and peace that Hannah found in her role at Bly was so fundamental that even death wouldn’t stop her from getting up, putting on her earrings, and going to work. That’s part of it at least.

Episode five, written by Angela LaManna and directed by Liam Gavin, is a beautiful hour of television. It’s puzzling and disorienting but with a strong mystery thread drawing us through the fog towards a solid conclusion. It’s T’Nia Miller’s detailed performance that really makes it great drama. Miller beams out Hannah’s trauma from under a thick layer of emotional restraint. On the surface, Hannah seems as controlled as her primly co-ordinated and accessorised outfits, but Miller reveals the pain and panic underneath. 

The pain and panic, and the love. In one of the many replays of Hannah’s first meeting with Owen at his interview for the job of Bly chef, she girlishly recalls finding him a curious and charming man. “I looked at you and I almost forgot myself for a moment.” Hannah’s love for Owen is the reason she keeps returning to that first meeting. “I prefer it here, this one, this day, with you … I loved you Owen. I should have told you. What a life we could have had” If Bly means home for Hannah Grose, so does Owen.

Let life happen to you

Hannah’s last words are a message to Owen. While Henry Wingrave is being resuscitated in the finale, Hannah leaves his ‘figment’ with an instruction. “When he checks the well, please tell Owen I’m sorry. Tell him I love him,” she says, before being cut off mid-sentence as the spell breaks and Bly’s trapped spirits are released. “And as for the rest…”  Then Hannah is gone. What would the remainder of her last words have been? We can’t know, though, in light of Owen’s taste for literary quotation (he quotes both Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet in the series), perhaps she was about to cite Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet: “And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” 

After Hannah leaves Bly for good, we learn the depth of Owen’s feelings for her. While he’s lighting a candle to Hannah in the chapel, Jamie tells us that he helped to retrieve her body and prepared it for burial, never leaving her side. His Parisian bistro is dedicated to her memory, and his speech at Flora’s rehearsal dinner has a bittersweet message that applies to so many of The Haunting of Bly Manor’s relationships, cruelly cut off before their time: Viola and her daughter Isabelle, Henry and Charlotte, Flora and Miles and their parents, Dani and Jamie, Owen and Hannah: “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.”

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The Haunting of Bly Manor is streaming now on Netflix.

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[lovehurried]

“I'm hoping you’ll understand.“

@enchantedorigins​ gets another spooky lyric one-liner for Jamie In for the Kill  ( La Roux,  La Roux  ( 2009 ) )

[lovehurried]

@wasworthy​ ​ said:    “ i know when your heart is heavy. ” whiskey words and a shovel ii starters  •  accepting.

“Ridiculous man.” The words come almost without her having to think them, fondness in them and in her level gaze as she looks at him. But even then, she has to acknowledge... He does, doesn’t he?

Since that first meeting, sat across from one another at the kitchen table as she interviewed him for the job, Owen has been open with her. What was it that he’d said - ‘I’m too honest. It’s probably pathological’? That rather sums him up, she thinks, and in turn he brings that out in others. 

He is a warm, constant presence at Bly, and she loves him for it. Loves him for more than just that, if she’s honest with herself. He’s so easy to talk to; always ready with a perfect cup of tea, or a pun she can roll her eyes at, or that look in his eyes that makes her want to tell him everything. 

That makes her want to be Hannah with him, not just Mrs Grose.

“Today is-- was my anniversary.” She relents.  “I suppose that’s why I seem a little... Melancholy.”

[lovehurried]

muse tag dump  -  h + i + j + k.

[lovehurried]

”How do you know that you're right?”

@wasworthy​​ gets another lyric one-liner Bling  ( Confession of a King )  ( The Killers,  Sam’s Town  ( 2006 ) )

[lovehurried]

“You needn’t keep glancing so furtively in my direction, Mr Wingrave.” 

Hannah’s voice is as even and pleasant as it would be if she were simply asking him how his journey had been. She wouldn’t be broaching this particular topic if she wasn’t absolutely certain that they weren’t going to be overheard - and isn’t her intimate knowledge of the goings on at Bly really rather the point?

She’s the only one of the staff still there at this hour. Charlotte is upstairs with Miles, telling the boy stories until he falls asleep. Dominic is away - which is, of course, why Henry is here.

“I know. But the information will go no further, as far as I’m concerned. I only thought I should mention as much to you because, frankly, that dreadful look of concern you’ve been wearing in my presence since you arrived is more suspicious than anything else that’s happened.”

@wasworthy​​ should know better than to encourage me by now

[lovehurried]

@wasworthy​ ​ said:    “ even the strongest heart gets broken. ” rest in mourning  •  accepting.

It occurs to Hannah that there are still so many things that she doesn’t know about him.

Owen has been with them for a few months now, and has become a part of the fabric at Bly so easily that sometimes she finds herself forgetting that he hasn’t always been there. But at times like this, when they’re chatting as he peels vegetables and she bows to his insistence that she ‘put her feet up for five minutes’ and have a cup of tea, she realises how much she still has to learn about him.

Her own reasons for living in the manor had come up naturally. Owen had made a passing, teasing comment about how one day he’d manage to get to work before her and - laughing - she explained why that was unlikely to ever be the case. The story is tied as much to her loyalty to the Wingraves as it is to her betrayal by her ex-husband, and she finds it hurts less every time she tells it. These days she focuses on the way they had - the way Charlotte had insisted on her making Bly her home without a second thought, and in doing so provided Hannah with much needed stability at a time when the foundations of her life had shifted beneath her in ways that she could never have predicted.

She’s smiling as she tells him this, but she doesn’t miss the way his gaze softens - not with the pity she so detested from others, but with something closer to concern. She isn’t too surprised when that prompts a surge of affection in her; she’s learned quickly that Owen’s charm is genuine, and it has endeared him to her all the more.

“But what about you, hm?” She asks, voice somewhere between gentle curiosity and teasing as she cradles a cup of tea between her palms, deflecting. “I can’t help but imagine you left a trail of broken hearts behind you when you left Paris.”

[lovehurried]

STARTER CALL  •  @willowdied​  •  Dani Clayton

Hannah sets a cup of tea down in front of Dani, before moving to sit on the other side of the table. “Now, you have to pardon my curiosity, but what on earth brings a beautiful young American to Bly, of all places?"

[lovehurried]

STARTER CALL  •  @smilesreturn​​  •  Steven Crain

“Frankly, it’s never really been my sort of thing,” Hannah sniffs, reaching for the sugar. “All this haunted house business. But as you’ve come all this way, I suppose the very least I can do is offer you a drink and ask what you’d like to know.”

[lovehurried]

STARTER CALL  •  @moonflowcrs​

“Ah, excuse me, madam!” Hannah calls out as she catches sight of the gardener. “I saw the rain this morning, you better hadn’t be tramping mud through this house! I expect that from the children, not from you.”

[lovehurried]

“It doesn’t hurt me.“

@truthlie​​​​​​​​ gets a spooky lyric one-liner for Miles Running Up That Hill  ( Placebo,  Covers  ( 2003 ) )

[lovehurried]

STARTER CALL  •  @punnychef​​​

“Sometimes I imagine how much easier my own job would be if yours didn’t seem to involve liberally coating the kitchen surfaces with flour quite so frequently.”

[lovehurried]

STARTER CALL  •  @accursedlight​​

Hannah will not bend to the darkness.

She doesn’t like to think of herself as a stubborn woman, but she supposes that she must be. Only a stubborn woman could plant herself so firmly in the face of this curse and refuse to let it twist her heart.

She’s known the stories her whole life, of course, but it hadn’t deterred her from taking a position as the palace’s housekeeper. She’s always maintained that there is little that can shock her - scare her - and so far, this attitude has served her well.

And yet. Something sets her nerves on edge every now and again, like a shadow flitting in and out of her peripheral vision, a chill seeping through the walls. It is one such moment that causes her to start while cleaning the kitchen, only to realise that the shape in the doorway is her employer.

“My apologies, sire. I didn’t hear you coming.”

[lovehurried]

STARTER CALL  •  @dreametchs​  •  Jamie Clayton

“It’s enviable, you know.” Hannah muses with a faint smile. “Your talent for gardening, I mean. So many people go their whole lives without finding something they can be so dedicated to.”