Title: nesting
Fandom: Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: G
Length: ~600
Content notes: None. Spoilers through episode 5 or maybe 7, I can't remember exactly. Let's say 7 to be safe. [eta: Whoops, make that 14. Sorry!]
Prompt: how to wrap a roc's egg

(Another one-hour piece, but this one didn't want to be so short. Spellchecked but unbeta-ed. Wheeeee!)

Summary: Leann Hart was never even born.


Leann fired the last of her staff months ago, so she has to do all the work herself. It's a labor of love, even if it doesn't look that way from the outside.

Three days a week, she writes news stories for the paper. No, she doesn't bother to research them first; she doesn't have time for that. Besides, no one is going to read them anyway.

Still, the stories are important. Things Leann has seen, things she's read. Occasionally, she writes down what Cecil says on the radio, but even Cecil is growing less and less important to her these days. She crafts elaborate prose about the weather, the seasons, the turning of the tides. She describes in great detail the color of her hair; the clothes in her closet at home. The feel of her shoes after a long day.

She doesn't bother to talk about the people she loves. She can't keep them.

She lays out the headlines, the photos, the captions. There are photos of herself, sometimes, as early as nine years old, as recent as yesterday. There are fewer people buying ads these days, so there are fewer ads to leave out entirely. Leann doesn't like the ads; she doesn't want them.

But she wants the papers. She prints them herself, sending the thin, porous paper through the rollers. The cutters slice cleanly through the sheets, then fold and stack them. All of it is automatic. It hardly takes anyone to make papers these days.

When they're done, Leann loads them into the back of her car (she sold the delivery truck last month) and takes them home. She parks in the garage and makes sure the door hums itself closed before she lugs them, bundle by bundle, into the living room. She heaves them into piles next to the industrial paper shredder she bought six months ago.

And then she shreds them, each story into tiny strips, the words separating from each other as easily as memories fall away from a moment in time. She shoves the shredded paper into the next room; it's the only one that isn't already full of paper.

It's only a matter of time. Soon, the whole house will be full. There will be no more room for stories, no more room for words. But the house will be ready.

And one night shortly thereafter -– she wishes she knew when, exactly, but she only recognizes the feeling of soon, she doesn't know how to measure it -– one night, the house will burn to the ground. All the paper she's hoarded, all the words and stories she's written. It will all go.

In the morning, someone will find a little girl in the ashes of the house. She'll look about nine years old; she won't be able to talk. She won't have a family, or any record of being born. Eventually, someone will take the girl in, and name her, and give her all the words she'll need to get through her life.

If there are any pictures left after the fire, someone might notice that the little girl looks a lot like Leann Hart did as a child. They might find the story in another paper, about a little girl who was found in the remains of a burnt-out house and taken in by a kindly Night Vale family. They might.

But Leann never has. She has only vague memories of her last life, certainly not enough to track down a name or a location. And if this urge she feels is what she felt before – and oh, how many years has she wished she remembered! -– this urge to gather up and destroy everything that she is now, so that she can begin again -–

-– If this is what she did before, she doubts if anyone will ever find the truth.