egeemlakunye

[anna-scribbles]

thirteen update 🌿👩🏼‍🌾🏚️🫢

chapter 4: January

chapter summary:

He pictured her face the last time he’d seen it, cheekbones peeking through smooth skin, smile taut over bone-white teeth. They would tell him, right? If something happened?

excerpt:

The thing about haunted houses is that “haunted” is a really vague descriptor, and it’s passive, which is just bad writing, honestly. There’s no indicator as to who’s doing the haunting, and how often, and why. There’s no real criteria for what “haunting” even means. A person can be haunted by a ghost, or their past, or the memory of eating bad sushi. A house can’t remember its past. It certainly can’t eat sushi. And Adrien’s not even confident that ghosts are real. (If you’d asked him that question about ten years ago, he’d have said no. But finding out that magic is real—and that you’re not—has a way of dampening your certainty of such things.)

Anyway, haunted houses are stupidly and imprecisely named. And if Adrien wanted to use an edgy metaphor to conceptualize the way his past won’t un-sink its twelve-year-old-molars from his throat, he’d just go back to thinking about forced heirship again.

(“—it’s non-negotiable,” the woman from the city had explained. “Property is passed down automatically to biological offspring upon death. You have been the primary owner of the estate since the previous owner, Emilie Agreste, died in—”)

Mostly, the house is just damp and cold and musty. Mostly, it’s just a monument to how excessively wasteful one absurdly rich and evil family can be. No delusions of haunting can be blamed for that. Adrien doesn’t even want to guess at how much money was poured into this place, only for it to get dilapidated by years of moisture and infamy.

(Ten-year-old paintings shouldn’t be sticky when you touch them. Layers of finely-detailed brushstrokes shouldn’t flake off and smear away at the brush of your fingernails, especially when there isn’t even anything underneath.)

It was always a terrible place for art, this house. His parents were collectors more than appreciators of any of it, buying up pretty things just to own them. Hang them here, where no one else would see. And it seems now that water damage has picked up where his parents left off, ensuring that no one else will ever enjoy them again.

(Of course there was nothing underneath. There’s never anything underneath, no matter how deep he digs. He should know that by now.)

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