Madeleine Gray (burnlyrical) wrote in light_of_may, @ 2011-01-14 09:39:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | #flashback, #solo, madeleine |
Just gonna stand there & watch me burn
Who: Madeleine & assorted NPCs
Where: Family house; London
When: 1991 (she's eight)
Eyes against keyholes. Something that made Madeleine just a little nervous after seeing what often came out of them in the movies she was still too young to watch. Child’s Play had made her wary of the doll that had forever been seated beside her bed, however, and her brother’s running commentary of Poltergeist was not helping at all. She had sat on the edge of her bed, knees pulled up to her chest, and stared at the alabaster figure until it creeped her out enough to want to turn it around. Which she wasn’t going to do. She mistrusted anything that kept its back to her - they had something to hide, clearly - and she didn’t really want to touch it. If she approached it and it moved even by accident, she knew she would run right back to her bed and Jackson would just laugh at her again for behaving like a girl even though she was a girl. Like the time he had stood over her bed with the same doll hovering over her face, gently poking her nose until she woke up and screamed. That wasn’t something she was ever going to forgive him for. She couldn’t even call him to take the stupid thing away either, because he would still laugh even though she could see him through the doorway, hiding behind a cushion. Brothers were useless. Glaring at the doll in its stupid harlequin dress, stupid harlequin hat and even more stupid painted on make-up, Madeleine slowly raised one hand and flicked it hard on the forehead, taking a little too much pleasure in watching it slump backwards. It was a small victory, but it was a victory nonetheless.
“You shouldn’t do that.” Annalise, the au pair, stood leaning against the door frame. Had she been watching her the whole time? She’s nearly creepier than you, she informed the doll via imaginary telepathy, righting it again. “They don’t like it.” Staring up at her, Madeleine just waited for the explanation, fidgeting with the doll’s hair. The au pair was a terrible story-teller. Bethany could tell better ones and she couldn’t even talk yet. In the next room, Jackson had turned his light off and climbed into bed, using her as an early warning. That wasn’t fair. She got caught flicking her doll in the face - which she was allowed to do because it was her doll - and he got away with watching scarier movies than even he would let her watch as well as deliberately scaring her with his own input. Brushing Madeleine’s hair out of her face for her, which was not appreciated and immediately reversed, Annalise took the doll from her hands and began arranging its clothing so it looked less like its owner was planning its demise. “My grandmother used to say that if you love a doll for long enough, it develops a soul of its own. So it can love you back.”
“I don’t love it,” the fire elemental corrected, climbing into bed.
“And,” the woman continued, unfazed, “their feelings can then be hurt just like yours can when someone says nasty things about you. They can get upset and they can get angry.” She set the doll back on the side, facing the bed. “Just like you.”
“They do not. That’s stupid.” Just like you. Glaring through being tucked in and subjected to goodnight kisses - ew, vanilla-germs! I only just had a bath, idiot - Madeleine squirmed around in her bed the moment Annalise had gone. She always did that thing where she tucked them in too tight so they couldn’t move at all. That wasn’t comfy, that was annoying. Mama tucked them in best, something that Jackson declared at the top of his voice a few moments later despite being nearly thirteen and not needing to be tucked in by anybody. The whole thing was stupid.
Her doll didn’t have a soul. Wasn’t going to get angry with her for knocking it over, either.
It wasn’t.
Was not.
With a fist-full of the blonde ringlets of the doll the au pair said had a soul and that Jackson said was going to drop on her head in the middle of the night for pushing it over, Madeleine padded up to the next floor in her pyjamas, doll in tow. She was going to ask the one person who answered questions properly. Even though it meant whispering through the keyhole and staring through until another eye appeared on the other side. Keyholes were creepier than dolls. They were creepier than creepy au pairs too. But she was still going to talk to Mama. Didn’t matter if He got angry with her. He was the one who brought a strange woman into the house who tried to scare her with her own toys.
“Mama?” It was a terrible stage whisper that carried through the entire house, but Madeleine didn’t rightly care. She wanted her mother to tell her the doll wasn’t going to try and kill her. Because it wasn’t. That would be stupid. “Mama, the au pair says my doll’s going to get angry and Jackson says it’ll jump on my head when I’m asleep, and--”
“Shhh.”
With a jolt, Madeleine dropped the doll with a crack that broke something and span around to gape at the mother she thought was on the other side of the door. For a moment, she just stood there, staring and wondering whether she should run back to bed. It was late, and even if Mama hated Him and Her, she still probably thought she should have been in bed. That was part of what mothers were for. So she fidgeted with the hem of her pyjama top and awkwardly rubbed at the itch on the side of her face while her mother tucked her hair back behind her ears - she didn’t mess it up again this time - and picked up the doll from the floor. The face had cracked, the eyes glaring out at the little elemental for its mistreatment. Madeleine bit into her lip. I didn’t mean to drop you! It was an accident. She had meant to flick it in the forehead though. And she said she didn’t love it. The doll hated her. Well, that was okay. She hated the doll too.
It was going to kill her in her sleep. She was going to end up with a broken face because she had dropped it. I’m going to kill Jackson.
“What has that ignorant underling been telling you?” Lila’s tone was harsh, but then it always had been. Somehow her children still knew what the bitterness was aimed at. It was never them. The hug Madeleine was pulled into dragged her out of morbid thoughts of murderous dolls and the untimely death of her big brother. Her nose wrinkled. Mama didn’t quite smell like Mama any more. She smelled like that dusty old room she had been locked in. But that was okay. When He had started throwing things away, she and her brother had sneaked into the room their parents used to share and stolen as much of their mother’s things back as they could. They were hidden in the toy-box that Jackson had sacrificed his thirteen year old’s pride for to keep it for that one purpose. It was either that or Madeleine’s dollhouse, but the dollhouse didn’t have enough room and you could still see through the windows.
“Said my doll’s going to come and get me because it loves me and I was mean to it and it has a soul,” the words tumbled out while Madeleine tried to wrap her arms around her mother’s neck, the fact they had not really seen each other for months only just registering over the crisis the au pair had started. Sniffling had started, though the elemental was adamant it was not coming from her and her eyes were just watering. “Mama, don’t go back in that room. Please?” She shifted uneasily, frustrated with the fact she knew Jackson would laugh at her crying if he saw her. Their mother never cried. Madeleine wanted to be like her. “We--You need to come back.” Jackson would let her have his bed. Her own was far too small for a grown-up. “And you need to make Her go away.”
Lila’s hand reached to poke at the door behind Madeleine and they watched it swing on its hinges, the lock mechanism blackened and charred to the point where a key had not been needed to open it. Madeleine blinked. “I know, sweetheart,” Lila gently pulled the braid from her daughter’s hair and started over. Only she had ever known how to make those red waves stay put so they didn’t drive their owner to distraction. It took twin french braids, but the au pair was clearly an idiot. Or simply incompetent. Without prompting, Madeleine provided the second hair-tie that she kept around her wrist out of habit. “Now, listen to me. This is very important - I want you to go back and wake your brother. Tell Jackson to take Bethany into your room, and you all wait for me there. Understand?”
A nod, and she was sent back to her room. The doll stayed with Lila. On her way back downstairs, Madeleine could smell burning, and turned her head just enough to catch a flash of the doll’s hair alight before her mother dropped it to the floor. It was still glaring.
“Shut up, Mama is coming. She said so.”
“You’re making this up,” Jackson muttered, though he had sneaked their baby sister from the au pair’s room anyway. “You’re just trying to get back at me for--”
“Jackson, shut up.”
“Jackson, shut up,” he repeated, raising his voice to the most irritating pitch possible. A moment’s silence passed while Madeleine sulked. Bethany had fallen back to sleep, though her cushion of a big brother shifted uneasily beneath her. “I can smell burning,” he admitted, eyes fixed on the heavy wooden door that blocked their bedrooms off from the rest of the house.
“Mama set my doll on fire.” Her tone was a little too bright for the subject matter, but it meant Lila was free from that horrible room again and it had been a stupid doll to begin with.
“No,” Jackson shook his head with a frown, “Something’s on fire now. Can’t you feel that?”
Palms flattening against the floor, Madeleine chewed on her lip. “Sort of,” she lied. Her brother was of a higher level than she was. Their element hadn’t accepted him as one of its own yet, but still. He knew things she didn’t. That didn’t matter so much though, she decided, drumming her fingers on his toy-box. She picked up on things faster than he did, which was why she was now clutching what was left of their mother’s belongings tightly, her eyes on the door. “It doesn’t matter. Mama is coming back.”
It was called a backflash - a term that meant very little to three children who could not burn, but it was that that claimed Jackson’s bedroom. Woken by the noise of Fire engulfing her brother’s belongings, Bethany was screaming. Someone else, on the other side of the door, was also screaming. But it wasn’t their mother, so the door to Madeleine’s room remained closed. Lying on the floor with a damp cloth over her nose and mouth - that was possibly the other reason Bethany wouldn’t be quiet - Madeleine stared at the layer of smoke that was forming above their heads, waiting to smother them. As if having water all over their faces wasn’t bad enough. Jackson had gone very quiet. It was very likely, Madeleine knew, that he understood this more than she did. She knew the house was on fire. She knew Lila was free. She knew the latter was probably the reason behind the former. After brief period of reflection, she had decided that if someone tried to lock her away in a dusty old room... she’d burn their house down too.
Then there were sirens. Sirens and flashing lights that were barely visible past the flames that were tearing down the conservatory. Jackson was at the window, pounding against the glass for help - something Madeleine didn’t quite understand, not even when she was carried kicking and screaming from the room. She wanted her mother. Not some probably-vanilla man with a mask that made him look like a cheap - and kind of creepy - Darth Vader at Halloween. Her mother. Somewhere, something had gone wrong.
And they had left the toy-box of Lila’s things in a room that was now burning with the same intensity as the rest of the house.
“You’re being stupid,” Jackson rasped. His voice was all messed up by the shouting and the smoke. They were both staring into their mugs of hot something-or-other the paramedics had given them. “Mama can’t burn.” But it didn’t mean she couldn’t die and they both knew it. The paramedics quizzing them on how it was that they came to be so fire savvy - Jackson was showing off with all his only-just-fourth-level knowledge - did not distract Madeleine. Eyes red and stinging from the smoke and too much rubbing, she stared at what was left of the house and frowned as the hoses drained the heat from the night air. Nobody except her brother seemed to understand why she was cold. Idiots. Nor did they understand why she didn’t want to be picked up by her grandparents - because the only grandparents she liked lived far too far away to come and pick them up.
Madeleine was waiting.
Eventually, when her hot apparently-chocolate was ice cold and the paramedics had run out of ways to keep disinterested children entertained, voices sounded in the background. Frantic but relieved.
There were survivors in the back garden.
Madeleine and Jackson exchanged looks, waiting for elaboration.
One survivor.
“I’m going to find where they put Bethany.”