Luke (withoutdisguise) wrote in somerealityrpg, @ 2020-02-01 22:05:00 |
|
|||
It felt like a dream.
Two years clean, sober, and completely without failure. It was just a massive shame that Luke hadn’t managed to get his shit together when Nellie had still been alive to see it, but as she’d said in the Red Room she was always with them, sprinkled on their lives like new snow. Didn’t mean he missed her any less, didn’t mean he stopped feeling her absence like a huge gaping hole that couldn’t be filled and definitely didn’t mean he stopped visiting her grave every week.
And so what if he talked to it, isn’t that what everybody did?
Of course this time had been different. Not because of his usual routine but what happened after he closed and opened his eyes he was not at Nellie’s grave but in a city, a city he didn’t really know, but apparently that was where he was. Honestly he was afraid that maybe he’d never escaped the Red Room after all but then he’d countered that with the fact the Red Room strived to give you what it thought you wanted to keep you distracted as it digested your fears, emotions and everything else associated with that process, and Nellie wasn’t here so… maybe it wasn’t a Red Room trick?
Eventually he was pointed and directed to an apartment block where he’d been living and honestly looking on the network made him want to lock the door and never come out again. Villains were roaming around Goodland it would seem, villains who he had zero want or desire to come face to face with, especially if the man in the hat just so happened to be one of those.
So, Luke just retreated into his room, and tried to make the best of a bad situation.
Eleanor Crain-Vance, or maybe just Crain, now, had experienced a lot of things in her comparatively short life. Finding herself somewhere bright and sunny that looked a lot like New York City was, somehow, still a shock to her. She remembered going back to the house, she remembered being shown a perfect life with her family and she remembered-
She remembered-
She remembered being alone and cold? She remembered seeing her siblings and shouting for them but none of them could see her, just like in that thunderstorm. She remembered her mother finally giving her the locket, the way she’d always promised she would and-
Darkness?
She shivered, read the letter again and, using the map, hurried towards the apartment block, trying to stay out of the way of the chaos on the streets around her. She didn’t know what had happened but, from checking the network from the device she’d been given, it seemed like ‘villains’ were running amok?
Wanting no part of that, Nellie focused on getting into the apartment building and up to the floor that held her room, unlocking the door and sliding inside, closing it heavily and resting her back against the door.
It didn’t feel like this was the Red Room. The Red Room and Hill House always had something bad about it, something that made the pit of her stomach drop out and her heart hammer painfully in her chest in a way very different from the way it was right now. What she was feeling, though, was something like… Luke? Though that feeling wasn’t unusual to her, Luke had been a part of her since before they were born, she’d never known a moment where she couldn’t just… feel him, so she paid it little mind. It was reassuring to know that the rehab was working, since she’d have felt it if he’d relapsed.
The apartment itself looked to be empty, and there was no indication that she had a room-mate or that someone else was living here on the letter, so she took off her coat and hung it up on the wall and moved towards the kitchen, thinking that if she was going to wait out the horrible events outside, she could at least do it with coffee.
Luke froze in his room when he heard the sound of the front door being opened. Had he forgotten to lock it behind him? Did that mean one of those insane villains had gotten in? Crap, crap, crap. He quickly assessed his room and disappointedly found that his options for weapons were limited at best so he did the only thing he could think of doing and that was to unplug the nearby lamp and wield it in his hands as a weapon.
Probably not a very effective one but it was the only thing he had.
Gathering up his courage, what little courage he did have (he’d always been so afraid), Luke ventured out of his room and was full on ready to threaten somebody with a lamp though when his eyes came to fall on the one person that he was certain he would never see again after the moment in the Red Room the lamp was dropped and Luke rushed forward to tug her into his arms, grip firm and more than a little desperate.
Nellie, thankfully, wasn’t holding anything when she was rushed from behind and yanked into a hug, only alerted to someone else being there by the sound of the lamp crashing to the ground. She’d started to turn but Luke had beaten her to it, and the easy warmth of their connection meant that she didn’t stiffen or freak out, merely turned in time to hug him properly, her arms around his waist and her face in his chest.
She could feel the tightness of his breath because her breath was tight and shaking, she could feel his disbelief and grief and desperation because she felt all those things too, her fingers twisting in the back of his shirt in a reflection of his feelings impacting her. She hadn’t been expecting to see him here, the Entity - whoever this person was - hadn’t put anything in the letter about her twin being here.
Luke felt… older, was that right? She leaned back to look at him, disrupting where he’d pressed his face against her hair, and one hand snaked up between them to cup his cheek. Then she looked past him to see the broken lamp on the floor.
“...Were you gonna hit me with a lamp?”
Luke exhaled a breath, long shaky, but one he had definitely not been aware that he was holding when Nellie leaned back. He gave her a lopsided ever so slightly guilty smile. “Uh, yeah. I mean, I thought you were one of those villains, but I didn’t so I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing here.”
They should if anything be focusing on the fact Nellie was alive and Luke no longer felt like there was a giant gaping hole in his soul.
“I missed you.”
“It’s only been three and a half months, Luke,” Nellie said softly, brushing her thumb over his cheekbone. Though even as she said it, something in the back of her mind niggled uncomfortably, like it knew that was a lie. Like something inside of her knew that wasn’t the truth. She wet her lower lip, brows furrowing slightly before she pushed it aside. “You look great,” she settled on saying, and he did. He looked healthy and rested and happy and better. The rehab was taking, had taken, and she was so relieved.
Luke’s brow furrowed when Nellie said something about it only being three and a half months. If he’d been any of their other siblings he might have gone with it but this was Luke and he was long since tired of all the lies.
“Maybe for you,” he admitted quietly. “But for me? It’s been two years, Nellie.” Two long very painful years that despite his siblings best efforts he’d never felt truly complete.
Until now that was.
“Wait- what?” She knew it was the truth, because she’d always been able to tell when he was lying even if she’d just ignored it. She leaned back a little further, hand dropping to his shoulder. “Where was I?”
She didn’t know if she really wanted him to answer; she could feel the grief he was feeling. It curled in her chest, making it clench.
“Luke?
It should not be this hard to get words out but it was. So hard. Luke struggled past what felt like a hand around his throat and a tight belt across his chest.
“You- You died.”
His voice broke and his lips shook from the sheer emotional weight of those words that still to this day didn’t feel right to speak aloud.
“I- no- it-” But it made sense, it made a heartbreaking amount of sense. She remembered the locket, the darkness, being right there, shouting and screaming but no one could see her. She remembered the sadness and the fear, the red room… But it was hazy. She thought it had been a dream.
Instead of allowing her own emotions to get the better of her, she focused on Luke’s, focused on trying to be calm for him as she reached up once more and curled her arms around his shoulders, cupped the back of his head and pulled herself into him, standing on her toes to hug him tightly.
“I’m here now. I’m- I’m so sorry, Luke. It’s okay, I’m right here.”
Luke felt bad. Nellie had always been there for him, strong for him, maybe just maybe if he’d been stronger than she might never have gone to the house and she might never have died the way that she did. He’d known the moment he’d received the news that it hadn’t been suicide, not Nellie, not when she knew what it did to a family and how devastating death could be.
And now? Now with the revelation that she’d died she was comforting him, again, like she always did. He should be stronger because he was, so much stronger, but he couldn’t help but fold into her embrace like a poorly stacked house of cards.
He hoped that this wasn’t a dream or some twisted narrative of the Red Room but at the same time if it was either of those things then he didn’t want to wake up or leave, not if it meant being with Nellie again.
“If this is a dream I don’t want to wake up,” he shared softly.
Nellie kissed the side of his head and tightened her arms around him again, feeling his arms tight around her waist. She pushed her hand through his hair and squeezed the back of his neck.
“I don’t think it is,” she told him, equally softly. “But if you’re dreaming, I’m dreaming. And we’ll just… dream together?”
Because that was what they did. It was what they’d always done.