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lov3-lik3-ghosts · 14 days

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could you write a enoch o’connor x reader or enoch x olive fluff? movie ver 🙏

Strange Trails

Pairing: Enoch O’Connor x fem!Portman!reader.

Warnings: Not beta read. Use of Y/n. Movie adaptation. No scenes with Enoch (he comes along in the next chapter).

Summary: Your Jacob’s sister and have come along with him to uncover Abe’s tales and held secrets, though you didn’t expect that the cute boy from your favourite childhood stories would become the source of your affections — and you definitely didn’t think that boy would begin to quote the music album you’d discreetly slipped him.

Format: Series — Part One.

Word count: 6.3k

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The death of Abe hit you in a different manner than it hit anyone else. The grief held off for the few weeks it took to arrange his funeral and wake, only a pit in the bottom section of your stomach that flared whenever you caught a glimpse of his smiling picture.

Jacob had reserved himself from you for the second time in your lives — the first being when he stopped trusting in the law that was grandpa Abe’s tales and you continued to live on in the weary dreamworld of childhood that it was for years to come. You’d repaired your relationship years ago, into something not quite the same but just as close, even this closeness didn’t stop the fragments of past hurt and fresh grief from seeping through the cracks.

Abe and Jacob were always close. A bond between boys that bound them into a more understanding relationship, a more loving one, and you couldn’t imagine what hell your brother bore with him after having found the eyeless corpse of someone so dear. Except you and Abe were close too, and it was hard for you too, yet you refused to fall into the pits that were holding him hostage.

You invested all your time into the planning of his burial, the built-up summer homework and ignoring the breakdown Jacob was suffering. You disregarded your sorrow and felt the disrespect curl at your gut when your father, Abe’s son, acted like Abe’s death was nothing more than an inconvenience to his mundane, dead-end life of watching birds. You looked down your nose whenever your brother chose you as his target for lashing words and cutting accusations of not caring, when all you felt like you were doing was caring so much.

You festered in the thick, murky depths of woe, mourning in the ringing silence of it and going through the motions of life with a certain robotic unfeeling.

You kept it up for a good while, all polite smiles and brief embraces for anyone with an ounce of sympathy to spare; then the funeral happened. Abe’s picture sat on a large splintered easel, an easel you’d picked out knowing he’d have picked that very one for all its rough edges should he have had the choice, and he’s smiling that crooked smile you only ever saw once in a blue moon.

Beside that, Abe’s sleek coffin is entrapped in bars ready to lower him into the higher floor level of Earth's layers and it’s then, when the casket is left all them feet down and the first shovel of dirt is flicked over it, that your resolve shatters.

Your chest pangs with an oddened palpation filled with anguish and loss and it travels quickly through to your stomach and churns it more viciously than anything before. Your throat lumps and clenches, the sadness awaiting to manifest into loud, uncontrollable sobs that would no doubt rack through your entire body; you try to swallow it down, try to save yourself and your family some dignity, gulping harshly. You fail.

The cry fields across the graveyard with piercing suddenness. You're the first to cry, or at least the first to let it be known, even Jacob stood beside you stays stoic — blank-faced and numb. He glances at you, the infamous trademark blues that only a handful of Portman’s carried flickering with their first kind emotion he’d had for you in weeks, all sympathetic and soft-centred.

You and Jacob were close growing up, you were each other's first friends, the first person the two of you would choose to share toys or snacks with, you’d shared a room for a while and you’d shared a womb once upon a time too; so even in the times you weren’t friends, Jacob would always be the first to remember that once you sobbed for the first time, it was end game. He wasn’t just some friend, he was your brother first, always.

His arm draped over your shoulder, pulling you into his side and letting you bury your face into the black of his suit despite knowing it’d stain with makeup. He stares forward with his eyes welling and you hear as he swallows thickly but the tears don’t fall. You continue to choke through your grief. And the two of you ignore the condescending pity the rest of your stoic-faced disconnected family convey at the emotional display.

“It hurts.” You gasp out silently, hand resting above the placement of your heart. “It hurts. I’m sorry, Jake. I’m so sorry that you- that we- he shouldn’t have- not like this. Never like this.”

“You don’t have to apologise to me, Y/n.” He whispers. “We both lost him. You lost him, too.” This is the sanest you’ve seen your brother since the accident, the sanest you’ve felt since, and you have a brief moment of hope that flushes through your grief and visualises into a happier future. A future where Abe Portman didn’t die from a brutal attack, where Jacob Portman didn’t close off when you most needed him not to, where you didn’t have to take on so much responsibility all the time.

But that is a future that can no longer have a chance to exist.

Abe Portman is gone. Jacob Portman closes off to cope. You were always going to be forced to pick up the slack.

That’s the natural order now. Not much change, you could deal with it. You had too. You always picked up the slack, Jacob always closed off; Abe wasn’t always dead.

When you and Jacob parted at the funeral the last of the comfort parted with it, clinging to your heart with a suchness that it almost ached. You’d tried to weasel your way into his time, hoping for even a semblance of connection and understanding that you knew only he could offer but Jacob’s grief was a wild, springy, spiral that sparked with a drive of madness and a hunger for answers. Yours better resembled a hazy daydream that clouded your reality and took away your normal sensitivity to life and its breathing tendrils, yours doesn’t spark alight so much as it sparks out.

You have no such madness. No such drive.

You’d prefer your brother's version, alive and reminiscent rather than your dead and grey but your brother’s had caught up to him, so at the very least you were left be for your drabness. Reminiscence for Jacob meant retelling and seemingly harbouring a certain belief into the tales Abe loved to tell you as children, and as much as you sympathised with him for the therapy he was forced into, you would do just about anything to recall the faces and the names and the peculiarities and the stories of the children at the orphanage like Jake seemed too. You would do anything to have your grandpa back like that.

Your parents worried too much about Jacob’s state of mind to really pay attention to your withdrawn one which really felt like both a blessing and a curse all at once. On one hand, you wanted some doting and comfort, you wanted some companionship in a world that suddenly seemed so big and lonely. On the other, you had much more free reign to garner a way to cope and much more time to laze and mope and actually use your newest coping mechanism. Music.

There was so much to music that it felt like a never ending learning curve that you could obsess and consume without ever running out of materiel. Your family were more well off than most and so you could afford the luxury of getting the things your mechanism beckoned for; the guitars, the keyboards, the vinyls, the Walkman tapes, the drums, the speakers — you had a growing collection that slowly began to overtake the span of your room in a comforting display.

You’d had some of it before Abe’s passing, gifted to you by him to sate his own love for music and share it with someone he knew could appreciate it. A modernised vinyl player had been assigned a seat on the surface of one of your chest of drawers long before with a box filled with records on the floor beside it and an electric guitar had hung on your wall since you were only twelve.

Your grandpa had been the one to teach you how to strum the strings and play the chords and he’d done so while learning alongside you; those were easier times filled with peals of laughter and burts of wisdom whose memories left a melancholic river of longing streaming through your blood and down your face. Still, you played and you listened and at first you had to force yourself to enjoy something so associated with him but eventually it became your solace. Eventually, it was everything you needed.

Eventually, the memories stopped clouding your heart and your eyes and music was something that kept Abe’s memory alive and unhindered by your grief. It was his, and it was yours, and you carried it everywhere you went.

••

Having to go through the house of a lost loved one was an experience you wouldn’t wish on anyone. To see the home where he had lived look so lifeless and unlived in was just another drive home of his loss — your loss.

It didn’t stir your heart and churn your stomach like his burial had, you didn’t give throaty cries and cling desperately to your brother like you wanted too. This fostered a sting, a finality and a reminder. Abe is gone and he’s not coming back.

Your grandpa was a hoarder. He didn’t collect in a way that gathered in the entrance of each room and was left to cake itself in layers of moulding gunk but every spare nook garnered papers and maps and trinkets that to an outsider seems pointless. That to your dad, seemed pointless.

You and Jacob fought restlessly for the possession of any items your father picked up, one thing that meant nothing to Jacob meant something to you and vice versa, but Franklin had no attachment to any of it and most of your fight was lost simply because of that. You knew most of the things you wanted to keep didn’t actually have any vital virtue but they were all things you knew Abe treasured and in extension, you did too.

There were black bags lying all around you, filled and fastened and ready to go into the skip. Your throat did that funny clench and clamp you’d become accustomed to whenever you thought about throwing them away, thought about how his entire life was bagged and going to be discarded like it was all nothing. Like his life meant nothing.

You had to keep reminding yourself that your grandfather wasn’t the things he kept, that throwing them away wasn’t tarnishing his memory, that parting with them wasn’t parting with him. Abe didn’t live on through the hoarding of his past keepings, he lived on through you, through Jacob, and through anyone else that remembered him.

The only thing that Franklin had no argument for was the pictures that had either you or your twin in them and the stashed money kept in the oddest of places. It was to your guys’ uncommon luck that you caught a glimpse of the familiar sleek dark leather that belonged to a box your childhood yearned to have back, after your father had left the room. You’d opened it with a tense jaw and a cautious glance over your shoulder, knowing if you were seen with it it would be snatched from your grasp without a gallon of sympathy.

The monochrome pictures inside were just as you remembered, aged and weathered and fading, they were of a proud woman and orphaned children doing absolutely impossible things that as a child had left you wondered. A woman with a pipe silhouetted before a tall window and angled so you couldn’t decipher a face to recognise; a boy no older than yourself now holding a young girl you briefly remembered to be his sister, with only one arm — the most baffling thing about that photo however, was that the girl held a ragged rotound boulder overhead with a dainty hand and both smiled at the camera like it was the easiest thing they could ever think to do.

A boy clad in shin length shorts and a striped shirt and a thin jacket and bees, hives of them making home up the left of his torso and trailing along the left of his face, he was perfectly calm — stoic even and looked into the camera seemingly fed up. There was one of a seemingly unremarkable boy, dressed in the sophistication of an ironed suit and the curl of a derby hat, one hand rest in a pocket and the other hung loose by his side and he smiled faintly with his head held high; the visual oddity of him was the circular metal of a projector slotted over the crevice of his eye that, when you looked close enough, had small dials that allowed a ‘zoom in, zoom out’ factor. You remember thinking as a child that he didn’t look peculiar at all and more like a character on the fast track to becoming some sort of evil genius with tech gadgets; Abe had had to explain to you time and time again that looks could be deceiving. That sometimes the most unpeculiar looking people were the most.

The next photo you picked up was another boy in a suit, this one was less pristine with a knitted vest warming atop his shirt and an open overcoat, he sat laxly back against the wood of an armed chair with his feet resting on the kicked up balls of his dress shoes; a tweed cap, pointed forward to face the mirror reflecting the front of him, hovered metres above his collar. His invisibility had made him one of your favourite children to hear of when you were younger, the tales Abe had of him going nude to frighten the other peculiars and the locals would have you in stitches for hours; the memory made you huff a melancholic breath.

You shuffled the pictures around, moving to pick up the next one before hearing the light pound of footsteps creaking along the floor. In a panic, you dropped the ones you held back into the box and latched it back closed with haste, shoving it into the opening of your backpack. The bag lay crumpled by your feet as you spun around, schooling your posture to a strait-laced force formation and feigning innocence through wide eyes.

Jacob stood before you, looking between yourself and your bag with a half smirk. “Found something good?” He whispered, nodding down at it curiously. You tensed, following his gaze, you stared in silence.

You knew you could tell him safely, Jacob wouldn’t tell your dad about anything you chose to keep, but these photos were different. These photos would cause a boundless battle between the two of you that would end with more lost love and ceaseless hostility than you could ever handle.

For a moment you looked at him; he’d want these so wholly if he saw them, maybe perhaps he’d treasure them more than you would, but you’d never been selfish, you never kept something for yourself, and this was something you don’t think you could give up.

Shrugging through your answer, you speak lowly, “Photos. Nothing too great, just thought that dad might start to think we’d gathered enough of ‘em.” Your brother seemed satiated by your answer, turning on his heel and hunching over another bland moving box with a hum, but that didn’t stop the twanging guilt from cramping its claws around your heart and throat. It didn’t stop the way your mouth stuttered open to spill the honesty behind the first lie you’d ever told him.

“Hey, Jacob?” You call, truth dancing its delicate waltz along the tip of your tongue, readying to spin its way out, but your mind flashes with all the consequences that could come hand in hand. He could run with it, drive himself madder quicker than he already was after you inevitably lose the fight for possession, or he could do something drastic — suggested by his therapist — like burn them for closure. Neither were worth the trouble you foresaw.

When Jacob called back in affirmative you scrambled for something else to say, routing through all the conversations you’d wanted to start with him since Abe. “He loved us, you know? Loved you.” It was a stretch because you knew he was more than aware that your grandfather had loved him, loved the both of you more than anything, some lousy and futile attempt at consolation that you’d thought up when you hadn’t had the time to truly feel it for yourself, but you’d have to roll with it now.

“I know.” He turned back to look at you, an eyebrow climbing high on his forehead as if to say it was obvious.

You blanked, a bubble of panic hazing your thoughts. There wasn’t anywhere you could really take this conversation, Abe had loved you, and that was that; you loved Jacob though, and the two of you hadn’t really said that since before you’d turned double digits, now seemed the perfect time to remind him.

“I love you.” Jake’s face contorted, looking at you with affronted confidence, you figured he’d found it frivolous that you’d spoken it because the two of you had sworn up and down as children that the other would always come first — no matter the situation. Neither of you ever broke promises. “I- I just mean that I- we haven’t said it in a long time and… I just thought now would be a good time to remind you. In case you forgot.”

“Forgot?” He asked. “I’d have to get hit in the head to forget, idiot.”

You smiled, “You sure? You were clearly dropped on your head loads as a baby, probably built up a resistance.”

Your brother scoffed, looking to the side into an open box and taking pick of a small plush before lobbing it at your head with a smirk. You dove to the side with a squeak, stepping over your bag with twisted steps and landed halfway down the wall with your hands curling into the plaster. Jacob guffawed, wheezing out breaths as he bent at the knee, open palms hitting his thighs in exasperation.

“Ass.” You snicker, separating yourself from the wall. The plush he’d thrown at you landed by your feet, having hit the wall when you did; it was a fluffy blue thing, discoloured with age and matted by years of use, the stuffing was worn down, it’s arms and stomach more deflated than full and one eye had undoubtedly been stitched messily back in.

There was a darkened stain by its nose, blood red and grossly crisping the curls by its snout. You faintly remember the moment that caused it, a small nosebleed you’d bled after a failed game of pirates that ended with Abe tucking you and your brother into bed, the bear nestled between you. It was well loved and another thing you and Jake had shared. Your throat clogged.

He watched as you bent down, wrapped your fingers around the strap of your bag and the teddy before straightening again with a grin. “Look,” Your thumb and index fingers imbed into either side of the bear's head, wiggling its face at Jacob’s. “It’s Bobby Bear!”

He rolled his eyes, feigning an itch on his nose to smother a smile behind a hand and turned back around to the boxes. You sat Bobby on top of the photo box in the backpack, adjusting him to look more comfortable before zipping it closed; the forming fondness zipped in there with it, ready to be reopened when you were back in the relief of your room.

“Y/n?” Jacob asked. You hummed, looking at the back of him. “I love you, too.” His words were tentatively uttered, a cautious chitter of the affection he’d earlier forgone. Your face softened, a warmth inflaming your chest; your brother was a recluse, even in his best of times and affectionately inept, him expressing verbal emotion was as rare as a cat befriending a bird, and just as heart stirring.

His shoulders tightened the longer you stared, squirming under the weight of your muteness. You bit down a teeth-baring grin, cruelly letting him stew in the anxiety for a few long moments before breaking it.

“I know.” You said and rucked your bag over your shoulder, planning to take place in your dad’s awaiting car. You brushed a hand along the blade of Jake’s shoulder when you walked by him, an action you’d both reciprocated since high school — a way to say “I love you” that put the two of you at ease. His shoulders fell.

••

You lay spread eagle across the span of your bed, staring blankly at the ivory pebbledash of the ceiling above you. Your shoes were by your door, still tied into double knots after having been toed off the second you’d walked through the frame and covered by the blue of your dropped jacket.

Today had been trying, a churning rollercoaster ride of emotions and oldened memories and fights for possessions — old wounds had been loosely stitched close and fresher ones torn savagely agape. Abe’s house would never again be easy to be in, a house that was once so full of floundering life was now haunted with the ghosts of love and loss and the weight followed you even now, far from the once home.

Heaving a shuddering breath, you looked to the closed sack beside you. The culprit to your fib lay within, awaiting your curious melancholy with a beckoning lure; you lugged yourself up to pull the bag closer, tugging the zip open and gently manoeuvring the box out.

The golden latch clicked lowly as you unlatched it, the metal glistening against the dim light of your bedside lamp invitingly, a siren song to your desires that you tug open gingerly. The photos you’d earlier shuffled through had been placed so hastily back into the coffer that they were flipped the right side down, revealing the looping calligraphy of your grandfather's handwriting you hadn’t previously known inked them.

Spreading the turned pictures along the fold of your comforter, you briefed over the dates and names.

Peregrine; 1940. Victor & Bronwyn; 1939. Hugh; 1939. Horace; 1938. Millard; 1940.

You paused with a staggering pulsation of shocked disbelief. These were their names — the names of the children you’d longed so desperately to recall, the names you’d spent weeks racking your brain for, smothering the throes of envy towards your brother for having the one obtainable thing you wanted.

Peregrine. Abe always spoke of her with a deference, eyes glinting through the rules she’d ingrained into him — the matron of the children’s home. He never referred to her by anything other than Miss or matron, aside from the one time he’d called her the bird before quickly deferring into an invisible tangent, so you were left with only that to refer to her by.

The longer you looked at the names, the more the tales refilled your head, stringing along in flash memories.

You didn’t have many for Victor and Bronwyn, only Abe’s descriptions of their brute strength; for Hugh, you recalled how often he’d use his bees to his advantage, eluding the others with a colony to bypass them; for Horace, you had a handful more — your grandfather having taken the time to fill your head with more of him whenever you expressed how unpeculiar he seemed in comparison — all about his interest in style and his gentlemanly nature and his dreams, now that you were older, the prophetic element to his peculiarity was much more intriguing. Millard’s tales were favoured between you and Jake, told on repeat to induce bellyaching laughter, Abe would laugh with you, choking over the words in breathless stutters — they were all of how Millard would go nude to startle the townspeople and the other children.

You huffed a watery chuckle. The photos still in the coffer beckoned when you looked at them, ageing corners yellowing and curling. The top seated one didn’t bring forth any recollection, only a chill that raised the hair on the back of your neck. Two children, dressed in extravagant all white, covering them down to even the tips of their fingers and the full shine of their eyes; the masks they wore run the full globe of their heads, leaving only two small slots for seeing and breathing, and looked to be made of thick paper mache. They were pressed side by side, one arm thrown over the other's shoulder with their heads tilted to face the taller photographer and when you flipped the monochrome the names there were nonexistent, replaced by only: The Twins; 1939.

Abe never showed you this photo. The longer you looked at it the more you understood why. Still now, at seventeen, it made you swallow and place it downwards. You were never good with faceless, masked, oldened pictures — the unknown lying beneath it always made your mind run rampant with images conjured from the darkest parts of your imagination, like a fear of monsters under beds. The fact that they were peculiar only fueled the fear; the twins could actually be something made of nightmares under their masks.

A blonde stood in the next picture, hair falling in perfect waves. Her dress hung loose, patterned with spaced flowers, collared with a Peter Pan style most popular in the 1920’s and lengthing down to her mid calf. In her hand hung a thick platform boot, buckled with just as thick metal clasps and patterned with swirls — it looked like it weighed a ton but she held it like a weightless overcoat, looped through a finger. The matching one rests a few feet behind her, just before a patch of fallen, autumn browned leaves. She floated above the ground, bare feet hovering in a cleared circle, arms hanging by her sides, and an even smaller circle of shade just under her.

The boot in her hand acted as an anchor, stopping her from floating up and up, through the tress of branching trees and into the abyss of the sky. Her peculiarity you remembered: aerokinetic, or at least, that’s what your grandfather had once called it. The back of her photo read: Emma; 1940.

You froze.

Surrounding her name wrote a plethora of heart-shapes, calligraphed in the same deep black ink as the other pictures, some were coloured where others lay empty but you imagined all were done with a certain absentmindedness. The same absentmindedness you brained when you’d fallen infatuated with a boy.

No other photo had them and you felt the piercing tendrils of something like distrust creep around you. Had Abe hid things from you and Jacob? Things that mattered, deeper things than a lost puppy love. Was she a lost puppy love? Your father and aunt always gave your grandfather sideway glances when he claimed to love your grandmother, scoffing under their breaths and whispering about “funny affairs”. You’d assumed they meant sketchy people at the time, peculiar people, your young mind naive to the bedtime stories. But now, the word “affairs” had a whole new meaning to you and you couldn’t help but wonder if Emma was “funny affairs”.

Was this why he never let you hold the pictures? So you didn’t glimpse the back and piece things together?

With a furrow between your brow, you collected the spread monochromes and placed them back into the box, lightly latching it closed and sliding it under the space between your bed and the floor, leaving the unseen for another day. Going through the motions of getting ready for bed with a robotic remembrance, your mind ran a mile a minute, all your thoughts clouded with everything he’d ever told you.

You’d always idealised him. Abe could never do wrong, if there was a man to make the sky, he hung the stars and lit the sun, if there was a word you followed without question, it was forever his. You knew it was childish, the type of endless trust you give to the instruction of your mothers words as a tot, but until now he’d never given you a reason not to take his word as law — biblical.

How many times had Abe evaded information?

When you lay down, under the comfort of your blankets and against the plush of your pillows, your body relaxed from a tense you hadn’t realised had taken you. Your eyes fluttered, forcing themselves closed, weary from the emotional turmoil that was your day but your mind wasn’t quite as ready to settle. You try to push the distrust down, hoping maybe it’ll flow out of you with sleep, but it has already paced its way through the previously impenetrable force of your idealisation of him, aflame with your fathers forever distrust.

How often did he lie to you, if he did at all?

The tendrils deepened, running murky red with betrayal and cutting its sharp knife-like point into the depths of your gut.

Did you ever truly know him or was he a man of well spun lies and secret lives?

••

Your birthday came quickly. The excitement that usually took home in your chest wasn’t there at all, rather diminished by a hazy cloud of something akin to sorrow.

The initial shock-horror of the accident had slowly been dwindling, evaporating in such a way you barely noticed, but in its place lay the wanting of Abe to be there for your milestones — and everything that came in between. This was your first birthday without him and the third time it sunk a hollow home into your chest.

Your parents had arranged a surprise party, more for Jacob than for you, that was turning out to be more of a family gathering. The living area was crowded with the subsections of your extended family — cousins you’d never met and aunts and uncle’s you could just barely remember. You’d been lucky enough to be able to slip off through the archway of the door closest to the party, falling just shy of an unfamiliar woman, who had been following you around all night and trying to start a conversation.

Jacob’s walls are lined with posters of things you’d never been able to take interest in and trinkets gathering dust atop his own chipped chest of drawers. He’d never been particularly messy, like Abe he had an organised clutter of things that seemed otherwise useless piling on the spare shelves of his open closet, but his floor was kept clear. The only thing that stood out amongst his space was the drawn blinds; Jacob was one for daylight when you were children, the curtains never stayed closed long enough for you to lay in and he’d go around all your house pulling the curtains aside and hooking them back, seeing a change as small as this reminded you just how hard the loss of Abe was for him.

Footsteps creaked along the floor outside the door, coming along in a rushed pattern. A fleet of panic took your breath. Surely the same lady from earlier wouldn’t go as far as to follow you in here, surely she wasn’t that desperate to talk with you. The doorknob twisted and clicked open in the same second. Jacob’s body slipped between the small gap of the frame, his hair and shirt dishevelled the same way yours had been. You let out a breath.

He hadn’t noticed you perched on the edge of his bed yet, head thrown back against the door and his eyes squoze tight, his grip on the handle didn’t loosen, twisting and turning it round and back again.

“Uncle Mayan?” You ask. He flings himself backwards, headbutting the door with a resounding thwack, and groans as his hand flies to cradle the crown of his head. Your eyes meet his, swarmed with mirth and Jacob’s face twists with irritation and relief.

“Yes.” He mithers, shuffling the distance to his bed and slouching to sit atop his crumpled duvet while still kneading his scalp. “What are you doing in my room? I know you're a lazy ass but surely not enough to not walk two doors down.”

“Shut up.” You roll your eyes, shoving his head forward with force. Jacob screeches and sends his elbow into your ribs. The hit tethers over your skin and pulses pain up your side, when your hand touches the area it’s already tender and you’re sure it’s already blooming with irate reds and blues. “Asshole,” You snarl. “That’s gonna bruise.”

“Don’t start what you can’t finish, Y/n.” He smiles sarcastically, still rubbing the back of his scalp.

“That’s it.” You sneer playfully. “You’ve waged war.”

Jacob raises his brows, “You already did that when you scared the crap out of me.”

You huff a shallow breath, narrowing your eyes at him, “I was only in here to get away from an aunt I don’t remember ever meeting before. She wouldn’t stop following me around and I already talked with her for twenty minutes. I don’t think she even told me her name.”

Jacob wheezes a laugh at your misfortune, falling back into his bed. “You deser-”

A knock resounds on his door, three light raps against the wood. He springs back up as your fathers sister enters without waiting for his say. When you look at him, he looks as enervated as you feel.

“It’s Aunt Susie.” She smiles, making her way over to you almost sheepishly. “I’m so glad you’re in here,” Her blue eyes reflect off the encroaching daylight, peaking through the shutter, when she looks at you. “Thought you guys might want to open this one.”

You shuffle closer to Jacob when she sits on the edge of the bed, giving her more space to settle. The small, book-shaped package she’d walked in with rustles its brown paper when she softly hands it over to you. You hold it with a frown, looking puzzled between the gift, Jacob and her. Susie’s grin softens as she fills in the pieces. “It’s from your grandpa. Found it while I was packing up.”

Jacob swallows lightly as he takes it from your hold, thumbing the curt edges when he looks to her, lips parted. “Thanks.” He says softly.

Susie huffs a small laugh, pushing up from the bed with her hands and making her way out the open door. Jacob looks to you when the soft click of the door sounds, his eyes round. You can only gesture to the gift in his hands.

The rip of the paper echoes louder than it should when he tugs it free, somehow thrumming louder through you than the thump thump of your soaring heartbeat.

As you suspected, when Jacob pulled the paper back a hardback book reveals itself. The cover isn’t much to marvel over, shades of blue and white forming a pretty picture on its front but its title folds your brows.

The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Abe was a man of many interests. Sailing, history in most its forms, music, storytelling, geography, travelling; but through all of that never once had he expressed an interest in poetry, not to you.

Jacob parted the hard cover from its beginning page, the spine creaking lowly under the movement and you smothered the returning hollowness that wove your heart to scoot closer. Abe’s handwriting drew your eyes the moment you saw the yellowing page, calligraphed as beautifully as you always remembered it and addressed to your brother.

To Jake, and the worlds he has yet to discover. From Grandpa xx

Only your brother. Your heart sank.

Jake took no notice of the drop of your shoulders or the swallow you choked through, absorbed entirely in the final gift your grandfather ever gave him. He turns the next page to a photograph slotted between, one of a tall hill, buzzed green grass and mounted with darker trees. There’s a line of differently coloured brick buildings just below the slope and before what seems like a small beach of grainy sand or a white paved walkway leading into a clear-watered section of a larger bay.

Cairnholm. The word is written in clear letters in the lower left corner of the photo and you wonder briefly if that’s what this place was before Jacob flips the card over to more beautifully looped letters. The silence lingers thick in the air as you both read.

My dearest Abe,

Emma flashes through your mind like a peregrine falcon, quick and fleeting and dauntingly beguiling. You hope terribly that your grandfather hadn’t been stupid enough to leave evidence of an affair so cruelly for your brother to find; you bearing the burden was enough.

I hope this card finds you well. The children and I yearn to hear your news. I do hope you will visit us again soon. We should so love to you see you.

With admiration, Alma Peregrine.

Unmistakable relief floods you in waves. Peregrine. The matron.

Jacob doesn’t utter a word for the two minutes more you stay sat, only flips back and forth between the words of Abe marring the opening page and the loops of Alma’s postcard. You leave his room with a heavy heart, ignoring the calls of your name from the bustling living room behind you. No final gift to awe over, to mourn with.

You wonder if he hadn’t found one yet before his unfortunate demise or if it had been chucked with the rest of his things considered insignificant and frivolous.

The slam of your door does little to quench the unbridled rage tightening your mind.

~ 𐀔 ~ 𐀔 ~ 𐀔 ~

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