#yay hooray they're haunting each other

[nsewell]

happy wip wthursday everyone xox. thank you sm for tagging me @hylfystt @serenpedac and @sealriously-sealrious!! i can't share what i'm currently working on for secret santa reasons so this is just a little something that's been percolating in my docs for a while about ava and nat living in a haunted house together that i'll probably never get around to finishing

i'll tag @dekarios, @kirnet, and @absolutebearings 🫶

It begins like this: something unseen watching from the darkness. A door opening on an unoccupied floor. A whispered conversation in a pitch black room. The distorted scratching of nails over the wallpaper. A heavy tome absent from the coffee table that will only remanifest after an extended period of truancy, and then slam to the floor of the kitchen while Ava prepares their morning reserve of blood. It’d taken hours to scrub the dark red stain from the tiles.  Annoyances, buzzing like flies over a deer carcass. This corpse of a house. It unnerves Ava, a nebulous threat that she cannot punch or push or punish in some way. Nat is, of course, endlessly fascinated. There’s something very appealing about the placid curiosity and parted mouth expression she casts over the scene of the fallen book and the fallen blood, and Ava bent supine on the floor, rag in hand and gnashing her teeth. They are still tenants, after all. She wants to take the splash of red on her thumb and smear it over Nat’s bottom lip, wine dark. Even amidst it all, they are cornered animals doing a careful circling around one another, tempered in their polite exchanges and guarded avoidance of certain topics. They have not been alone in this way for quite some time, and all Ava has is visions of before, pale periwinkle nights in temporary lodgings, the contrasting press of their hip bones slotting together, chestnut tresses curling over her breast in the early break of dawn. Only once every few years, and they don’t mention it again; the afterimage of what they've shared and set aside pounding at the threshold of Ava’s mind. When the pulse beat of memory becomes too tumultuous, Ava will look away or close a door or stand suddenly and Nat will stare at her for a long time like she knows what she’s thinking, a question on the tip of her tongue (oh, to be on the tip of her tongue).