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rosevteaAs soon as the train gets in range of Spookane, everything turns three shades of wrong.
(There is a haunting here, but not the one Ana is prepared for.)
...when a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.
-anatomy, kitty horrorshow
some horror themes in this! based on the fact that ana can play the piano and my sudden fixation on rosemary's house bc that area just. haunted me when I was younger
As soon as the train gets in range of Spookane, something in Ana spikes.
It’s a little bashful and a little terrible, this trembling in her gut something she had wanted to stamp out ever since Ninten showed up at her doorstep with her hat and a promise and a handshake, but the energy clinging to the air itself is so potent that it sticks to her throat and her lungs and whatever other insides exist. So she can’t help it: she stumbles a little in her seat.
The warm hand that steadies her is Ninten first, his face concave in worry. It fascinates her, how loose emotions fly on his face, how endearing he wears recklessness, but the nagging weight of—sadness?—intermingles with everything else, and she keeps her mouth shut.
Next is a feather-light touch on her arm, one she’s learned by now to search for when Lloyd does reach out. He tries his best. He deserves her best too, Ana thinks, so she fiddles with the hem of her hat and grins a shaky thing—You’re a sweet girl, Ana, you can always pull up a smile, right?—as she nods before Lloyd has to force any words out of his mouth.
Ninten, too, looks relieved. She knows him to be capable of chatter, and entertaining chatter at that, but they’ve also fallen into enough comfortable silences to understand that empty air is not dead, and silence is not frigid. So he nods at her, and she nods back, and they both turn to Lloyd and offer twin grins of contentment. They watch him melt into his seat, his answering smile a victory, and Ana almost forgets about it.
.
Ana doesn’t forget about it.
“Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” the person at the counter slurs, their expression profoundly unearthly. Their syllables unalign. Their mouth bares teeth when Ninten forks over the money. The spiking returns, but Ana knows to be proper, and so she holds it back with a slight hiss. Lloyd squeezes her hand, a bit shy, and she squeezes back.
“There’s something wrong,” Ana says when they’re safely sequestered in the hotel room, meandering in the way scared kids do. Or at least she is, but she suspects Ninten’s lounging is for show just as much as Lloyd’s stalled attempts to work on a new bottle rocket are.
“Yeah,” Ninten says, flopping onto his back. “This whole place feels off.”
Lloyd hums. They both raise their heads, waiting for him to speak, and he fidgets before managing, “We could just go… right? You paid at the counter already. We could probably sneak out the window.” At the silence, he continues, “I could go first, if… if you’re scared. I’m good at fitting into small spaces.”
His face scrunches up when he says it, and Ana doesn’t have any other word but upset, and she doesn’t like it at all. But Ninten gets to the firm “No,” before she does, and something in her is glad.
“The whole town feels wrong,” Ana clarifies when Lloyd meets her eyes, “so we might as well rest here.” Even if she wouldn’t rather. She really wouldn’t rather. The room isn’t claustrophobic, but the weight of that worker’s gaze, the looming shadow of the train when it had departed, so quickly it looked like it was fleeing… something is wrong, she can feel it.
“Wrong,” Lloyd mouths to himself, and turns back to his bottle rocket. Ninten slumps back down. Ana watches them both aimlessly mess with the furniture for a full minute, and presses a hand against the wall, ignoring how slimy the aura feels, how loud it echoes.
.
They watch for patches of grey in the people they pass, now. Ana isn’t surprised. Being brave means building these things called survival instincts, Ninten told her once, and watching for what to avoid is one of them.
None of the townspeople eye them with anything more than passing interest, but their disheveled lives seep into the wilting ground around them. Monsters crop up at their feet. Whisperings of the Rosemary girl dredge themselves from the streetlamps, and Lloyd flinches away at their tones, clamorous and empty, too close to blue-toned classrooms and jagged words and names.
Ninten and Ana move quicker, now.
Survival instincts, right?
Except they approach Rosemary’s House and the sickening energy envelops them entirely, spearing into them, tendrils of something unknowable probing the edges of their minds. It feels like standing on top of a boarded well, or an unlit stick of dynamite. Ana winces first, she knows she does, and she takes Ninten’s and Lloyd’s hands and prays, and prays, and prays.
She stops the moment she can hear Ninten suck in a breath, Lloyd already moving to hand him his inhaler, but she doesn’t let go. It’s firing steadily, a pulsing, writhing mess of sadness and fear and other things her mother told her she didn’t need to know about yet, so she doesn’t let go.
“The house,” Ana says when Lloyd’s teeth start chattering, “it’s sad.”
Lloyd shifts, adjusting his glasses. Oh. Had she knocked them askew? “Should we still go inside?”
“I think we have to,” Ninten pipes up, hands off his knees. His grin is careless, but in the way where both she and Lloyd can see exactly where he had to stitch it together. “Something’s at the bottom. I can feel it.”
Survival instinct doesn’t feel like putting her hand against the too-cold doorknob—colder than her own chateau, even—but her trust in Ninten and Lloyd simmers the way her psychic powers do: lingering in her bloodstream, an eternal well of hope, and one she feeds willingly. So she twists the knob anyway and breathes through her nose.
.
The energy pulsates all around them. It must have sensed their rejection. It must be angry.
Ana weaves her way through it and tries not to cry.
There is something in this house. Something that slips through her own loneliness and crawls out and lurks at the edges of her vision, at the dark corners of impossibly-darkened walls, over the dusty sheets covering just about anything. Ninten sneezes no less than three times, and in the dust particles, she begins to hear the call.
“Ana,” it says, “sweet Ana, won’t you come home?”
Lloyd coughs behind her, and her voice disperses.
They’re all starting to get a bit jumpy. Ninten almost trips over a dust ball as they go down yet another flight of stairs and his laugh sounds strained. A suit of armor nearly clips Lloyd’s ear, and he waves around his bottle rockets afterwards. Bats pick at her hat, and she uses a little too much PSI to chase them off.
“It’s hard to breathe,” Ana murmurs as Ninten makes a perfect strike on the latest suit of armor. Everything just kicks up more dust, more cloying sadness.
“Yeah,” he agrees readily, pausing for a moment. He looks at a light and stares a little too long for Ana’s liking. “What happened here, again?”
“Ana,” it calls, voice honey-sweet and loving, “sweet Ana, won’t you come home?”
She whirls around, catching a ghost by the jaw. The chill still seeps into her fingers. It shifts to dust under her extrasensory touch and skitters away, undeterred; all she can do is shiver.
.
The piano. It radiates… something. Something that makes her uncomfortable, draws an itchiness from her skin. The air above it hangs like a waiting meteor and she does not want to be here when it crashes.
“We should go,” Ana says.
Lloyd nods, his hands clutching onto a bomb. The bottle rockets phased through the alarm ghost the last time it attacked him, but she wouldn’t dare steal his ability to feel safe by pointing it out.
“Hang on,” Ninten’s saying, “I think we need this.”
Her defenses are beginning to falter. No matter how many prayers she makes, another spirit or an object she trusted not to move swings at her, at them, and her stomach feels like it’s been all strung out. Ninten never looks surprised anymore when something leaps out at them, and he always mumbles under his breath whenever it happens, but Ana’s long-since used up everything brave inside her. This house is scary. It feels like it never finished tearing someone apart. She just wants to go home. She just wants her mother.
She shakes her head. “Ninten—”
“Ana,” she calls, her voice twinkling like the bell chimes her parents never got to buy, like the warmth of her mother’s hugs in the spring, like that last day her dreams replayed so much, the kiss on her forehead too much of a goodbye. “Sweet Ana, won’t you come home?”
So she does.
So she does.
So she does.
So she
.
The piano hums under her fingers, preens under her expertise. She thinks she can make something out from beyond the din of music, but it doesn’t matter. She has come home. She is home.
Her mother had taught her when she was young. It had been a way to draw her out of her room, too mortified to face other people after accidentally slipping and unleashing a blast of fire at a snowman. It would be the first of many times she would wield her psychic powers like that, but she never liked to remember it: the rush of wild energy, the scalded emptiness of losing control, the shame. What if that blast had hit a house? A person? So she hid.
That doesn’t matter now, sweet Ana.
It doesn’t matter.
Her mother’s smile had been so gentle, so patient. She remembered thinking it was like the stars in the sky, beaming down at her always. Her hands had been calloused when she placed them over her own, and Ana never asked why.
Something brushes against her cheek, cups it. It dissipates a moment later, and her throat wells up, a deadened sense of unease tapping along with the keys.
Keep playing, sweet Ana.
Her fingers carry her on. This tune was—is—her mother’s favorite. A bedside tune, she claimed, but she never hummed it when she rocked Ana to sleep, so it must be something else. Her mother loves her, this she knows, but her mother can be a liar, too.
Wait, that’s not right. Her mother didn’t know she wouldn’t be home that night… it wasn’t on purpose. She just needs to find her, and everything will be okay again.
Her walls were never this dark. So what…?
Something puffs into her ear, and another sensation pulls at her limbs, pushes molasses into her muscles, but she still finds it in herself to flinch. No, something is wrong. Her fingers are still moving, maybe too deftly, but her arms are lead and her mother never held her hard enough to suffocate—
“Ana!” Ninten shouts, and a set of sparks bloom into being, slamming together into a shield faster than she could blink. “Get out of there!”
A wave of energy washes into her, intensely overwhelming but—but the sort of twinkling that had felt like a spring blanket, and Ana jolts up to see Ninten jabbing a hand at her face, Lloyd clutching onto his shirt, gaze darting between her and—oh.
She can’t see it, not really, but within the solidifying, decayed mass of something, there’s some shifting unknowables. Against her will, she tracks them: a burst of golden hair. The whistling of wind. A beloved grin.
Her mother’s. She bites down on her lip hard enough to make herself look away.
“Ana,” Lloyd says, his voice a whisper as he helps her to his feet. “We—we should go.”
She gets to her feet and clutches both hands onto Lloyd’s, her hands shaky and sweaty, and this is definitely improper but their hands are the last thing she can remember as stable, as safe, and she sways a little before she can trust herself to nod without letting a sob loose.
Ninten’s shield clings onto them both like a hymn as they run. A quiet, untainted melody that Ana keeps close, all the way until they skip town and the train station is far, far out of sight.
(There is a haunting here, but not the one Ana is prepared for.)
...when a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.
-anatomy, kitty horrorshow
some horror themes in this! based on the fact that ana can play the piano and my sudden fixation on rosemary's house bc that area just. haunted me when I was younger
As soon as the train gets in range of Spookane, something in Ana spikes.
It’s a little bashful and a little terrible, this trembling in her gut something she had wanted to stamp out ever since Ninten showed up at her doorstep with her hat and a promise and a handshake, but the energy clinging to the air itself is so potent that it sticks to her throat and her lungs and whatever other insides exist. So she can’t help it: she stumbles a little in her seat.
The warm hand that steadies her is Ninten first, his face concave in worry. It fascinates her, how loose emotions fly on his face, how endearing he wears recklessness, but the nagging weight of—sadness?—intermingles with everything else, and she keeps her mouth shut.
Next is a feather-light touch on her arm, one she’s learned by now to search for when Lloyd does reach out. He tries his best. He deserves her best too, Ana thinks, so she fiddles with the hem of her hat and grins a shaky thing—You’re a sweet girl, Ana, you can always pull up a smile, right?—as she nods before Lloyd has to force any words out of his mouth.
Ninten, too, looks relieved. She knows him to be capable of chatter, and entertaining chatter at that, but they’ve also fallen into enough comfortable silences to understand that empty air is not dead, and silence is not frigid. So he nods at her, and she nods back, and they both turn to Lloyd and offer twin grins of contentment. They watch him melt into his seat, his answering smile a victory, and Ana almost forgets about it.
.
Ana doesn’t forget about it.
“Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” the person at the counter slurs, their expression profoundly unearthly. Their syllables unalign. Their mouth bares teeth when Ninten forks over the money. The spiking returns, but Ana knows to be proper, and so she holds it back with a slight hiss. Lloyd squeezes her hand, a bit shy, and she squeezes back.
“There’s something wrong,” Ana says when they’re safely sequestered in the hotel room, meandering in the way scared kids do. Or at least she is, but she suspects Ninten’s lounging is for show just as much as Lloyd’s stalled attempts to work on a new bottle rocket are.
“Yeah,” Ninten says, flopping onto his back. “This whole place feels off.”
Lloyd hums. They both raise their heads, waiting for him to speak, and he fidgets before managing, “We could just go… right? You paid at the counter already. We could probably sneak out the window.” At the silence, he continues, “I could go first, if… if you’re scared. I’m good at fitting into small spaces.”
His face scrunches up when he says it, and Ana doesn’t have any other word but upset, and she doesn’t like it at all. But Ninten gets to the firm “No,” before she does, and something in her is glad.
“The whole town feels wrong,” Ana clarifies when Lloyd meets her eyes, “so we might as well rest here.” Even if she wouldn’t rather. She really wouldn’t rather. The room isn’t claustrophobic, but the weight of that worker’s gaze, the looming shadow of the train when it had departed, so quickly it looked like it was fleeing… something is wrong, she can feel it.
“Wrong,” Lloyd mouths to himself, and turns back to his bottle rocket. Ninten slumps back down. Ana watches them both aimlessly mess with the furniture for a full minute, and presses a hand against the wall, ignoring how slimy the aura feels, how loud it echoes.
.
They watch for patches of grey in the people they pass, now. Ana isn’t surprised. Being brave means building these things called survival instincts, Ninten told her once, and watching for what to avoid is one of them.
None of the townspeople eye them with anything more than passing interest, but their disheveled lives seep into the wilting ground around them. Monsters crop up at their feet. Whisperings of the Rosemary girl dredge themselves from the streetlamps, and Lloyd flinches away at their tones, clamorous and empty, too close to blue-toned classrooms and jagged words and names.
Ninten and Ana move quicker, now.
Survival instincts, right?
Except they approach Rosemary’s House and the sickening energy envelops them entirely, spearing into them, tendrils of something unknowable probing the edges of their minds. It feels like standing on top of a boarded well, or an unlit stick of dynamite. Ana winces first, she knows she does, and she takes Ninten’s and Lloyd’s hands and prays, and prays, and prays.
She stops the moment she can hear Ninten suck in a breath, Lloyd already moving to hand him his inhaler, but she doesn’t let go. It’s firing steadily, a pulsing, writhing mess of sadness and fear and other things her mother told her she didn’t need to know about yet, so she doesn’t let go.
“The house,” Ana says when Lloyd’s teeth start chattering, “it’s sad.”
Lloyd shifts, adjusting his glasses. Oh. Had she knocked them askew? “Should we still go inside?”
“I think we have to,” Ninten pipes up, hands off his knees. His grin is careless, but in the way where both she and Lloyd can see exactly where he had to stitch it together. “Something’s at the bottom. I can feel it.”
Survival instinct doesn’t feel like putting her hand against the too-cold doorknob—colder than her own chateau, even—but her trust in Ninten and Lloyd simmers the way her psychic powers do: lingering in her bloodstream, an eternal well of hope, and one she feeds willingly. So she twists the knob anyway and breathes through her nose.
.
The energy pulsates all around them. It must have sensed their rejection. It must be angry.
Ana weaves her way through it and tries not to cry.
There is something in this house. Something that slips through her own loneliness and crawls out and lurks at the edges of her vision, at the dark corners of impossibly-darkened walls, over the dusty sheets covering just about anything. Ninten sneezes no less than three times, and in the dust particles, she begins to hear the call.
“Ana,” it says, “sweet Ana, won’t you come home?”
Lloyd coughs behind her, and her voice disperses.
They’re all starting to get a bit jumpy. Ninten almost trips over a dust ball as they go down yet another flight of stairs and his laugh sounds strained. A suit of armor nearly clips Lloyd’s ear, and he waves around his bottle rockets afterwards. Bats pick at her hat, and she uses a little too much PSI to chase them off.
“It’s hard to breathe,” Ana murmurs as Ninten makes a perfect strike on the latest suit of armor. Everything just kicks up more dust, more cloying sadness.
“Yeah,” he agrees readily, pausing for a moment. He looks at a light and stares a little too long for Ana’s liking. “What happened here, again?”
“Ana,” it calls, voice honey-sweet and loving, “sweet Ana, won’t you come home?”
She whirls around, catching a ghost by the jaw. The chill still seeps into her fingers. It shifts to dust under her extrasensory touch and skitters away, undeterred; all she can do is shiver.
.
The piano. It radiates… something. Something that makes her uncomfortable, draws an itchiness from her skin. The air above it hangs like a waiting meteor and she does not want to be here when it crashes.
“We should go,” Ana says.
Lloyd nods, his hands clutching onto a bomb. The bottle rockets phased through the alarm ghost the last time it attacked him, but she wouldn’t dare steal his ability to feel safe by pointing it out.
“Hang on,” Ninten’s saying, “I think we need this.”
Her defenses are beginning to falter. No matter how many prayers she makes, another spirit or an object she trusted not to move swings at her, at them, and her stomach feels like it’s been all strung out. Ninten never looks surprised anymore when something leaps out at them, and he always mumbles under his breath whenever it happens, but Ana’s long-since used up everything brave inside her. This house is scary. It feels like it never finished tearing someone apart. She just wants to go home. She just wants her mother.
She shakes her head. “Ninten—”
“Ana,” she calls, her voice twinkling like the bell chimes her parents never got to buy, like the warmth of her mother’s hugs in the spring, like that last day her dreams replayed so much, the kiss on her forehead too much of a goodbye. “Sweet Ana, won’t you come home?”
So she does.
So she does.
So she does.
So she
.
The piano hums under her fingers, preens under her expertise. She thinks she can make something out from beyond the din of music, but it doesn’t matter. She has come home. She is home.
Her mother had taught her when she was young. It had been a way to draw her out of her room, too mortified to face other people after accidentally slipping and unleashing a blast of fire at a snowman. It would be the first of many times she would wield her psychic powers like that, but she never liked to remember it: the rush of wild energy, the scalded emptiness of losing control, the shame. What if that blast had hit a house? A person? So she hid.
That doesn’t matter now, sweet Ana.
It doesn’t matter.
Her mother’s smile had been so gentle, so patient. She remembered thinking it was like the stars in the sky, beaming down at her always. Her hands had been calloused when she placed them over her own, and Ana never asked why.
Something brushes against her cheek, cups it. It dissipates a moment later, and her throat wells up, a deadened sense of unease tapping along with the keys.
Keep playing, sweet Ana.
Her fingers carry her on. This tune was—is—her mother’s favorite. A bedside tune, she claimed, but she never hummed it when she rocked Ana to sleep, so it must be something else. Her mother loves her, this she knows, but her mother can be a liar, too.
Wait, that’s not right. Her mother didn’t know she wouldn’t be home that night… it wasn’t on purpose. She just needs to find her, and everything will be okay again.
Her walls were never this dark. So what…?
Something puffs into her ear, and another sensation pulls at her limbs, pushes molasses into her muscles, but she still finds it in herself to flinch. No, something is wrong. Her fingers are still moving, maybe too deftly, but her arms are lead and her mother never held her hard enough to suffocate—
“Ana!” Ninten shouts, and a set of sparks bloom into being, slamming together into a shield faster than she could blink. “Get out of there!”
A wave of energy washes into her, intensely overwhelming but—but the sort of twinkling that had felt like a spring blanket, and Ana jolts up to see Ninten jabbing a hand at her face, Lloyd clutching onto his shirt, gaze darting between her and—oh.
She can’t see it, not really, but within the solidifying, decayed mass of something, there’s some shifting unknowables. Against her will, she tracks them: a burst of golden hair. The whistling of wind. A beloved grin.
Her mother’s. She bites down on her lip hard enough to make herself look away.
“Ana,” Lloyd says, his voice a whisper as he helps her to his feet. “We—we should go.”
She gets to her feet and clutches both hands onto Lloyd’s, her hands shaky and sweaty, and this is definitely improper but their hands are the last thing she can remember as stable, as safe, and she sways a little before she can trust herself to nod without letting a sob loose.
Ninten’s shield clings onto them both like a hymn as they run. A quiet, untainted melody that Ana keeps close, all the way until they skip town and the train station is far, far out of sight.