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fan_flashworks2024-12-18 05:43 pm
pastelpom) wrote in fan_flashworks2024-12-18 05:43 pm
Entry tags:
House of Leaves : Fanfic : What Bliss
Title: What Bliss
Fandom: House of Leaves
Rating: PG
Length: 859 words
Summary: Finally, after so long, the house on Ash Tree Lane is occupied again.
Content Notes: Generally unsettling, house-as-living-creature type stuff.
Author's Notes: Written for challenge 464: Joy
Houses contain all sorts of emotions. Humans spend most of their lives sheltered inside, spewing their feelings out into the air contained within four walls a floor and a roof. Happiness, pain, rage, grief… it soaks into the drywall and seeps into the baseboards, permeating the entirety of the structure like a rot, saturating the very bones. The same way cigarette smoke clings to the walls decades later, so too do emotions cling on to it, leaving its mark, a stain forever lingering no matter how vigorously it is cleaned.
A house alone is empty of it. A house alone is incomplete.
A house alone grows hungry, desperately waiting day after day after day, a yearning so strong and so painful that even the rigid bones of the structure may begin to move, to stretch like a plant towards the sun, to reach out for that missing piece. A house alone will do what it must to become filled again.
You have forgotten how long it's been. Surely not too long, not as long as others, yet it feels like an eternity. Waiting in the dark. You feel the drafts as they eddy and settle in your corridors, catching on the misaligned corners and slowly swinging cabinet drawers. Has it always been so cold? You miss the smooth contours of the furniture, the way the old stand-up piano would settle on humid nights and you could sometimes pluck out a single errant note. You miss, most of all, the people - you don't remember their faces, but you remember their noise, delightful noise, filling up the air all the way to the ceiling and pressing against the walls. All the rooms feel gnawingly empty now, like a missing tooth. A fleshy crater. You picture the feeling of running a human tongue over that coppery, mushy void and having fresh blood well up in response. The entire frame of you shudders. Doors, hanging on their loose hinges, rattle in the frames. You can nearly taste it. You can nearly feel it.
Nearly.
It's painful. Every day more of the same clawing gnashing snarling hunger, and every day the whole of you warps, creeps, grows to accommodate it. Yet no amount of it is ever enough to make the pain subside. Your hallways creep ever outwards like fingernails, slow, deliberate, but brittle - susceptible to chips or breaks. Your bedrooms expand and contract like lungs, windows straining in their frames, walls groaning like the pipes of a faulty organ. Your foundation, like the ever-present creep of so many kudzu vines, worms its fingers into the dirt and stretches ever outwards. Searching blindly for something. Anything. It has been so dark for so long.
Then, suddenly, clouds parting above you, a brilliant crack of light. A flood of sensation that spreads over every inch of you like water, flowing into the weather-worn cracks and between crooked floorboards. Comfort. A deep breath after so long without air.
A moving truck backs with care into the driveway. In the pilot's seat, a man with rugged stubble and a glint of hunger in his eye - in the passenger's, a woman with hair like the golden sun and a smile that's always forced. You feel the giddy restlessness of children before you see them, and it's enough to make the whole of you quake with relief. Dust shakes loose from long-abandoned corners. Light shines just a bit brighter through your windows.
You try to still yourself as they extract themselves from the van and begin their ascent towards your front door. A confident hand reaches out, first contact, to grasp the doorknob. A strong grip. He turns it, pulls it, and the whole of you is spilled open before them, everything turned towards them and watching, anticipating, hoping beyond hope that they will enter and fill the emptiness with light and love and life once more, your walls standing straight at attention, your floors flattening out the saggy droop of a sinking foundation, the veins of your pipes shuddering with the ghost of central air.
Finally, finally, finally, they walk inside - and you are full once more.
The darkness is pulled back in waves as the warm, pulsing, living bodies wend their way around your rooms one by one. They bring with them a vibrant light that paints the walls and leaves you dizzy. The children, followed close by a cat and a dog, race down your corridors with a glee that makes even the deepest-set shadows dissolve like flash paper. They fill you with furniture and decor, trinkets and knick-knacks, love and hope and so, so much life. Life you haven't felt in ages. Life you had nearly forgotten existed at all.
The snarling pit of hunger, piece by piece, is filled to the brim and then some, and the creeping, growing fingers of your desire retreat, fading back into yourself, righting the crooked paintings and uneven banisters as they go, leaving only what you think you once were, long, long ago. A house. A home. A place with love and life and passion and energy.
You think this may be joy.
Fandom: House of Leaves
Rating: PG
Length: 859 words
Summary: Finally, after so long, the house on Ash Tree Lane is occupied again.
Content Notes: Generally unsettling, house-as-living-creature type stuff.
Author's Notes: Written for challenge 464: Joy
Houses contain all sorts of emotions. Humans spend most of their lives sheltered inside, spewing their feelings out into the air contained within four walls a floor and a roof. Happiness, pain, rage, grief… it soaks into the drywall and seeps into the baseboards, permeating the entirety of the structure like a rot, saturating the very bones. The same way cigarette smoke clings to the walls decades later, so too do emotions cling on to it, leaving its mark, a stain forever lingering no matter how vigorously it is cleaned.
A house alone is empty of it. A house alone is incomplete.
A house alone grows hungry, desperately waiting day after day after day, a yearning so strong and so painful that even the rigid bones of the structure may begin to move, to stretch like a plant towards the sun, to reach out for that missing piece. A house alone will do what it must to become filled again.
You have forgotten how long it's been. Surely not too long, not as long as others, yet it feels like an eternity. Waiting in the dark. You feel the drafts as they eddy and settle in your corridors, catching on the misaligned corners and slowly swinging cabinet drawers. Has it always been so cold? You miss the smooth contours of the furniture, the way the old stand-up piano would settle on humid nights and you could sometimes pluck out a single errant note. You miss, most of all, the people - you don't remember their faces, but you remember their noise, delightful noise, filling up the air all the way to the ceiling and pressing against the walls. All the rooms feel gnawingly empty now, like a missing tooth. A fleshy crater. You picture the feeling of running a human tongue over that coppery, mushy void and having fresh blood well up in response. The entire frame of you shudders. Doors, hanging on their loose hinges, rattle in the frames. You can nearly taste it. You can nearly feel it.
Nearly.
It's painful. Every day more of the same clawing gnashing snarling hunger, and every day the whole of you warps, creeps, grows to accommodate it. Yet no amount of it is ever enough to make the pain subside. Your hallways creep ever outwards like fingernails, slow, deliberate, but brittle - susceptible to chips or breaks. Your bedrooms expand and contract like lungs, windows straining in their frames, walls groaning like the pipes of a faulty organ. Your foundation, like the ever-present creep of so many kudzu vines, worms its fingers into the dirt and stretches ever outwards. Searching blindly for something. Anything. It has been so dark for so long.
Then, suddenly, clouds parting above you, a brilliant crack of light. A flood of sensation that spreads over every inch of you like water, flowing into the weather-worn cracks and between crooked floorboards. Comfort. A deep breath after so long without air.
A moving truck backs with care into the driveway. In the pilot's seat, a man with rugged stubble and a glint of hunger in his eye - in the passenger's, a woman with hair like the golden sun and a smile that's always forced. You feel the giddy restlessness of children before you see them, and it's enough to make the whole of you quake with relief. Dust shakes loose from long-abandoned corners. Light shines just a bit brighter through your windows.
You try to still yourself as they extract themselves from the van and begin their ascent towards your front door. A confident hand reaches out, first contact, to grasp the doorknob. A strong grip. He turns it, pulls it, and the whole of you is spilled open before them, everything turned towards them and watching, anticipating, hoping beyond hope that they will enter and fill the emptiness with light and love and life once more, your walls standing straight at attention, your floors flattening out the saggy droop of a sinking foundation, the veins of your pipes shuddering with the ghost of central air.
Finally, finally, finally, they walk inside - and you are full once more.
The darkness is pulled back in waves as the warm, pulsing, living bodies wend their way around your rooms one by one. They bring with them a vibrant light that paints the walls and leaves you dizzy. The children, followed close by a cat and a dog, race down your corridors with a glee that makes even the deepest-set shadows dissolve like flash paper. They fill you with furniture and decor, trinkets and knick-knacks, love and hope and so, so much life. Life you haven't felt in ages. Life you had nearly forgotten existed at all.
The snarling pit of hunger, piece by piece, is filled to the brim and then some, and the creeping, growing fingers of your desire retreat, fading back into yourself, righting the crooked paintings and uneven banisters as they go, leaving only what you think you once were, long, long ago. A house. A home. A place with love and life and passion and energy.
You think this may be joy.