please come home
Fandom: OBTD
Pairings: Nola/Charlie, Lola/m!Jordan, Aaron/Mica
Word Count: 431, 320, and 306 respectively
Home is where the heart is - until we get a chance to bury it
The night that they buried Charlie, it snowed and the following week when Nola sat listlessly by her grave, a deer came up to her out of nowhere, solid white with huge round dark eyes. It came out of the darkness so quietly than in her grief, Nola hadn’t even heard it and when it stopped right beside her, she startled. All it did was tilt its head to the side and slowly walk away, but Nola had felt the strangest sense of peace.
The next week, things begin to change. Their youngest daughter, Haven, had taken to sleeping in Nola’s room. The dhampire girl was only six years old and curled into Nola when she first climbed into bed with her. “Do you miss Mommy?” Nola had asked as she wrapped her arms around the child, wondering if that was why she had suddenly abandoned her own bed when even as a toddler she had been fiercely independent and only liked to cuddle or stay in her parents’ bed on certain occassions. Haven had drowsily shaken her head. “I can’t miss her because she’s still here.” Nola had frozen then but Haven had continued on. “I don’t like it when she walks around in the afternoon when you’re sleeping.”
It began to get stranger. Some things Nola had given to Charlie’s family and other things she had kept for herself and their children but plenty of things had been put away to ease the grieving process. Charlie’s hairbrush was one of those things that Nola kept with Charlie’s personal effects and locked in her drawer but somehow it was always on the dresser or in the bathroom; she would wake sometime near dawn to the sound of a record playing in the living room and when she went up to go check and see if Haven was awake, the record would suddenly scratch to a halt; doors that had always fit perfectly on their hinges before would start to open or close on their own; and on more than one occasion, Nola was certain that she saw a flash of blond hair out of the corner of her eye, would hear the faint tinkle of Charlie’s laugh.
She sat in the living room, watching the leaves of a fern flutter as if someone had just passed by though she was the only one in the room and she couldn’t help but wonder how many haunting went unreported because the creaking of doors and the wailing of something unseen was still one hundred times better than the sound of an empty house.
Sometimes when two people love one another, it is very unfortunate
She wakes in the middle of the night and smells hot chocolate. Lola smiles to herself as she rolls over to Jordan’s side of the bed and presses her face to his pillow; it is cold and his scent has grown very faint. She wonders how long he has been out of bed as she sits up and blinks sleep from her eyes, the shapes of her furniture familiar even in the dark - the chair over which a pair of her jeans and Jordan’s militia hoodie are thrown, the dresser only a few feet away, other odds and ends. She reaches down to the floor, looking for his t-shirt which usually always winds up there, no matter whether they make love or not - he shucks his shirt off sometime in the middle of the night. She doesn’t find it, doesn’t have the sense of mind to keep looking for it, and pulls on his hoodie from the chair. Stumbling over his boots on the way out of the room she mumbles, reminding herself to tell him to stop unintentionally booby-trapping their bedroom and put his crap away.
There is a pounding in her head, an empty aching in her chest, a gnawing at the back of her mind that won’t let her go and she gets halfway to the kitchen before she remembers that he’s dead. It hits her so suddenly that she wavers where she stands before she continues on and finds that yes, the kitchen is empty and the smell of hot chocolate is probably left over from when her sister and Aaron had visited that day, worried about her considering the fact that she had refused to leave her apartment for two weeks, automatically giving everyone the same answer when they ask why - What if he comes home? She wonders if her mind keeps playing tricks on her in an effort to steal him from his grave.
This is what frustrates me
Aaron sits dutifully by Mica’s bedside. Sometimes he holds her hand though most of the time he’s not sure if he has the right to, he does it anyway because the smile that lights up her face makes the glare he might receive from Ross or Lola or her parents worth it. The smile is dazzling, but confused - she’s happy because she feels like she’s done something right but she also doesn’t know if he has the right to hold her hand. He looks up from the book in his lap when she makes a small noise, pulling her hand from his. There is a faint line of stitches barely discernable from under her bangs but his eyes are automatically drawn there each time he looks at her. He wishes he had known from the very first moment they had met the unpayable debt he would owe her. He would have the delicate lace pattern of a burn along one side of his torso and she would have. . .well, so much more.
“Knock knock!” she says, grinning at him.
He pauses, his eyes narrow in confusion, and suddenly it dawns on him what this means - her remembering something and telling a joke. “Who’s there?” he asks.
She pauses then and the grin slides slowly from her face, her dark eyes searching his as she tries to think, tries to remember. Her brow furrows just slightly in the middle and her expression breaks then. “I can’t remember,” she says and begins to cry, rolling onto her side and turning away from him.
He reaches out with one hand to touch her, but doesn’t make contact. He wishes there was a better word than “sorry” and a better phrase than “I love you” and “thank you” but then he would probably need better words than those, too.