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theflyingfeeling · 2 years

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For those who are interested in what I have managed to write for my "Gran Hotel AU" so far: ta-da!

..and those who have no idea/memory of what I'm on about: last spring I wrote this short fic in the AU I had come up with (loosely inspired by my trip to Dublin and the Spanish TV series Gran Hotel). This part below I wrote last summmer, and it's actually chapter 3, but since chapter 2 is about a different character entirely, it's not too illogical to read this one first, in my opinion. That is, if there ever will be chapter 2 😅😩 I put my outline for chapter 2 in the tags (mild spoiler alert)! I also suggest you read my ideas for the AU in general in the tags of the post linked above, otherwise I'm afraid this won't make much sense 😆

The grove of the family cemetery greeted Joel like an old friend, taking him into its cool embrace, which Joel was grateful for in the heat of the late afternoon.

He walked past his grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ graves, only stopping to snip a dried leaf off the light blue violet in front of his paternal grandmother’s tombstone. In his mind Joel promised to bring her fresh ones for her next name day. Grandmama would understand, he thought. She always did.

By the duck pond Joel dropped by the resting place of his father’s twin brother, taken by pneumonia only two days before their sixth birthday. With no one having actively tended to the grave since grandmama’s passing nearly a decade ago, the old stone had begun to grow moss, all but covering the golden carvings. Usually Joel was too inside his own head to mind the grave of an uncle he never came to know other than from grandmama’s stories, but today something pulled him towards the plain, small mound to root out most of the weeds thriving on it. Perhaps he had heard grandmama’s authoritative voice in his ears for a split second.

From there he continued his unhurried journey deeper into the memorial park, anticipating as much as awaiting the final few stops on his tour, until he arrived at his father’s grave.

The white lilies had dried weeks ago already, but Joel was yet to find the energy or motivation to throw them away. The carvings on the stone were still fresh, however, standing out from the already worn ones on the right side of the stone.

Like every day for the past almost four weeks, Joel had no clue what to say. Say nothing, Joonas would have advised him, he ain’t gonna hear you anyway, he’s dead.

Ironically, Joel had not said a whole lot to his father when he had still been alive either.

Be as it may, something about the cemetery always made Joel talkative. He couldn’t have explained it if he tried to, but he supposed grandmama’s habit of walking in between the tombstones having full conversations with her long-deceased parents, her late husband and her baby boy had something to do with it. Joonas had always found it a little creepy and had politely declined grandmama’s plea for him to come along and learn about the history of his family, whereas Joel had gone with her each time, following on her heels and helping her take care of the flowers. One time, when grandmama had already needed a walking stick to support herself, she had asked Joel to look after the family graves and the garden surrounding them once she would be “gone to meet her maker”, as she had put it then. Joel had promised, but only after grandmama had reassured he wouldn’t have to go near the eerie, tumbledown mausoleum of his great-grandparents’, the founders of the Hokka estate.

That was why Joel often found himself crouching in front of names that no longer lived in people’s mouths, at least not the way they used to, staring at the dates that had changed his life forever, biting his lip in a failed attempt to keep himself from spitting out the disrespectful words.

“Fuck you.”

He grabbed a fistful of grass in his palm and continued without opening his mouth to speak the words out loud.

Fuck you for treating her the way you did.

Fuck you for treating them both the way you did.

Fuck you for treating us the way you did.

Fuck you for loving a bottle of whiskey more than your sons.

Fuck you for tending your minibar with more compassion and care than the legacy you’d be passing on to us.

Fuck you for dying of a heart attack at 65 and leaving us with this sinking ship.

Joel threw the shredded grass on the drooped lilies.

Fuck you for not being here for me.

When the letters on the tombstone began to blur, Joel looked away to get a hold of himself once more before he would move on. Visiting his father’s grave filled him with so much anger and bitterness and inexplicable hopelessness that he felt like skipping it altogether, but so far he hadn’t had the guts to do so, as if his old man’s disappointed look was still nailed to his back.

Having found his regular breathing frequency again, Joel stood up and turned to the pink roses growing in front of the right-hand half of the stone.

The woman resting in the casket six feet under may not have been Joel’s real mother, but she was the only mother he had ever had.

Although she had had a tendency to favour her biological son when it came to deciding which birthday boy was served the last piece of the strawberry cake (even if Joonas was, more often than not, willing to share) or who was bought new clothes more frequently, Joonas’ mother was still the kindest woman Joel knew and had truly loved Joel as he was her own.

The only time Joonas ever visited the cemetery was when they planted the roses on her every birthday in the beginning of June.

The last time Joel had seen Joonas cry was the day she had died, on a frosty February morning when Joonas had been fifteen and Joel sixteen. They had held each other close on Joonas’ bed, listening to their father breaking glasses in the office room above them.

‘Cause of death: fever’ Joel had read from the death certificate he had found in one of his father’s drawers in search of cigarettes, but in reality no one seemed to be certain what really had taken her. Their father had suspected it had been a food poisoning, and so he had had an excuse to take out his grief on the the blameless members of the staff and fired the chef and half the waiters, whereas grandmama had comforted the half-orphaned teenage sons that their mother’s heart had finally burst from loving her boys too much (which hadn’t been half as soothing as grandmama had probably intended it to be; instead, it had given Joel nightmares for weeks). There had even been talk in the town that she had gone mad with jealousy over her husband’s numerous affairs and eventually fallen fatally ill, simply due to heartbreak and excruciating loneliness.

Joel, on the other hand, knew better. He knew she had been stronger than that, always trying her best to make sure Joonas and Joel had been outside playing or bothering the kitchen staff, far out of earshot whenever she had confronted her husband after finding yet another maid in his bed. He knew she must have been unhappy in her marriage, but also that she had been aware of what she had married into. Yet, she had chosen to stay, not because she had loved her husband that much, but because she had understood she could never have afforded as much as a roof above her head, let alone be allowed to take her boys with her, even if she had been able to provide evidence of the adultery committed by her husband. She had stayed, because despite how miserable her life had undoubtedly been from time to time, she had wanted to ensure a happy childhood for Joonas and Joel, one where they’d have at least one loving parent in their life.

She would have deserved so much better than an unfaithful drunkard of a husband with heaven knows how many secret lovers and possibly even more illegitimate children. She would have deserved a more honourable final resting place than that next to the honourless scoundrel who had selfishly demanded to be buried by her side; a pathetic excuse of a man who had never deserved one bit of her unselfishness.

Those were among the countless of other things Joel usually murmured as he sat in front of her grave, on the grass right by the roses, just to be closer to her. This time, however, he remained silent, only reaching his hand to caress the cheek of a porcelain angel Joonas and he had brought there on the first anniversary of her death. The angel was missing its right wing, broken when the statue had been knocked down in an exceptionally intense thunderstorm. Joel had been devastated by the loss, but Joonas had told him she probably didn’t mind; she had always been drawn to all things broken and imperfect.

“You know, like that teacup without a handle she didn’t want to throw away because it had her favourite flower painted on it,” Joonas had said.

And me, Joel had almost added, the bastard son of her husband she could have easily thrown out of the house the second his father slid a ring on her finger and no one would have judged her for it.

Instead, she had read him bedtime stories and kissed his knee better when he had fallen down from a tree, and Joel wished he had told her how grateful he was for it all when she had still been alive to hear it. Alas, around the time of her death, Joel had been an adolescent full of rage, too burdened by frustration and fear to worry about the mortality of his mother.

“Joonas says hi,” he whispered to the tombstone. He touched two of his fingers to his lips and pressed them against the cold of the stone before getting up and walking away, towards the grave he always saved last on his tour.

During the years following their mother’s death, Joel and Joonas had kept receiving pitying looks and regretful words of condolence from members of the staff, the people of the town, and even the hotel guests who had gotten wind of the tragedy. “Poor boys,” they always said, “how ill-starred in life must one be, to lose his mother at such a young age.”

Yet, Joel had always thought Joonas was lucky.

At least he only had one mother to grieve.

Fair enough, Joel had never known his birth mother, the only daughter of Mr. Byström, who had been one of the most important investors of the hotel once upon a time. From the hotel’s tattletale receptionist Joel had heard that Mr. Byström and his wife had disappeared in a storm on their way across the Atlantic, only a week after Mr. Byström had asked Joel’s father to “take his girl under his wing”, should something happen to them during their journey.

Joel was pretty sure that by “taking his girl under his wing” Mr. Byström had not meant “knocking her up at the age of 19”.

Grandmama had never talked much about the circumstances of Joel’s birth, apart from the weather: “it was a real cloudburst, raining hounds and mousers for hours without end, and still your first scream was louder than any thunder that has ever roared above this house”.

Joel supposed she had wanted to be considerate towards the lady of the estate by keeping the names of the hotel owner’s previous lovers out of her mouth, although it wasn’t like Joel’s mother had ever been given such a privilege to begin with.

When Joel had been but six months old, his mother had understood the rumours she had heard weren’t just rumours. For two more months she had borne looking at young Miss Porko’s swelling belly before she had filled the pockets of her trench coat with rocks and jumped down the bridge crossing the river that ran by the estate.

Hence, there was nothing but soil below the wonky wooden cross Joel had erected in her memory in the farthest corner of the memorial park, in the shade of an enormous, over a century-old oak tree. Even if her body had been found, she would have been buried nowhere near the estate, for she had never officially been part of the family. Still, Joel had wanted a place to visit her, to talk to her, and since the bridge from which she had jumped to her underwater grave had rotted away years ago, he had had no choice but to make her a memorial on his own.

When Joel arrived at the cross, he sighed as he saw it having fallen down again and crouched down to straighten it. Then he took the rose from behind his ear and stuck it in the soil, next to all the other ones in various stages of wilt.

Some days he talked to her about his day; how he had gotten out of bed just in time for supper and avoided everyone until leaving the house when the sun began to set.

Other days he just sat there, wondering what on earth he should say to a mother who had not lived to see her firstborn’s first birthday.

It most likely would have killed her anyway, had she not done the job herself; as if by some cursed twist of fate, Miss Porko’s son was born on the 5th of October, exactly one year after Joel’s birth. And while Joel had been welcomed to the world with an intense downpour, Joonas’ arrival had ended nearly two weeks of rainfall and lured out the first rays of the sun in almost a month, if Joel was to believe his grandmama, who had always loved to reminisce about the events of that day.

From across the cemetery Joel had one day dragged an old wooden bench that had been situated near the grave of a long-forgotten relative – an uncle who, according to grandmama, “had always been a bit of a pillock” – and replaced it in front of his mother’s. There he sat for hours on end, staring at the cross and the roses, asking the universe over and over again what life would be like for him if his birth mother had lived for longer than twenty years and seven months.

Or if Joonas’ mother had not collapsed all of a sudden when getting out of the bath while Joonas and Joel had been busy arguing about who got to sit on the front seat of their father’s new Mercedes.

Or if grandmama was still around, offering her prickly life wisdom at every turn.

Or if his father was lying passed out on the couch of his office instead of dead in his grave. Maybe one of these days Joel would have had the courage to say all the things he wanted to say to him.

As the sun disappeared behind the forest looming at the border of the estate, Joel lay on his side on the bench and hugged his knees to his chest. He kept his gaze fixed on the white cross for as long as he could still see it before it got too dark, before tiredness forced him to close his eyes and wait for restless sleep to come.

#blind channel #blind channel rpf #blind channel fanfiction #chapter 2 would be olli's pov. it begins with him and joonas waking up in the same bed and talking all relaxed #then olli has to get back to work but he has to stop by his room which he shares with aleksi #(in the tags of the original post i say aleksi is a servant but i've actually changed him to be a waiter instead)#aleksi is there and they chat #then olli goes back to his gardening job and gives joel the rose mentioned in this chapter #(as in joel asks him for the rose)#basically the first chapters of the fic would be just to introduce the characters and their situations #but ugh i have bullied myself into not wanting to continue because i don't want to disappoint myself by not succeeding #i have a ✨vision✨ but unfortunately it needs to be perfect otherwise i'm not doing it 😭#apologies for putting this in the main BC tag pls don't hate me i'm but a poor fic writer #random tumblr ficlets by theflyingfeeling

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