InsaneJournal

Who: Ella
What: A narrative
Where: 905
When: After Leah leaves
Warnings: None


Leah hadn't taken any of her things, but Ella knew she wouldn't be seeing her again. She knew it in the same way she knew Vaughn had seen her at the coffee shop and decided not to join her. She knew that Vaughn had recognized the paramedics and police somehow, and she knew that meant her sister would never trust her again. She'd tried to fix things, and she'd failed and given herself away somehow.

The apartment seemed big and cold and lonely without Leah there, and Ella tried to chatter at Home as she made tea-for-one that evening, but it didn't help. In the end, she'd left the tea and given Home a kiss before settling him into his cage for the night.

There was something she had to do.

She retrieved Daniel's typewriter from her bedroom, along with his notebook, and she pushed the dumbwaiter door open and put the items inside. As she knelt there, in front of the little open door that had caused so many problems, she considered adding a note or writing him something.

In the end, she decided against it. Goodbyes shouldn't come with epilogues.

She hoisted the items back up until she heard the click that indicated they'd reached the top of the dumbwaiter's path and were secured on the other floor. Once they were there, she intentionally tugged the rope back around itself, hand-over-hand, until it was free from the pulley and useless. Until she couldn't get it back, not even if she wanted to.

She closed the door to the dumbwaiter, and she pushed the dresser in front of it.

She considered writing this all out to make herself feel better, but she didn't. She stared at the blinking cursor on the screen (on the novel about the building she'd been writing), and after an hour of silence, she deleted the entire file. Instead of writing, she opened up the vampire novel she was working on for the publishing house, and she set to work making notations about missing punctuation and errors in tense.

When she had the inclination to make a note in the margin about a particular character's inconsistent behavior, she ignored it completely.