Fandom: Linkin Park

Title: Core

Pairing: Brad/Chester

Author: FyrMaiden

Distribution: Journal, LPF – any others, please ask.

Genre: Angst

Rating: R – suicide, death, sex

Summary: They promised one another they’d be there together one day. A shame it took almost fifty years and death to achieve their dream.

Author's Note: As with Valentine's Day, I decided to do something a little different. I'm actually fairly sure it's solid crap, but it was meant to be a melancholy ghosty love story affair. But it went wrong and it's only taken maybe 3 or 4 hours to write. It's un-beta'd (obviously) and... well. Yeah. That's it really. I'd say enjoy, but it's unlikely!

Core

There’s always a house that you remember. For me, it was a run-down affair on the East side. I remembered clearly its soaring façade, remembered the way it seemed to stretch eternally up into the inky black of the sky. We would stand, hand in hand, gazing up forever, trying to see the pinnacle of the roof. He would wrap his arms around me and hold me gently against him, and I would rest my head on his shoulder.

“We’ll live here together,” he would murmur into my hair, and I would laugh easily.

“We could never afford this place,” I would say, and kiss his cheek lightly. He would smile easily and nod his acceptance, and his resonant black stare would return to the leaded windows of our Gothic dream.

The realtor sold it to me with a ghost story. It had been on the market for years, he said. “We did sell it to a gentleman,” he murmured in hushed tones as we walked its hallways and admired its crystal chandeliers. He gestured its grand central staircase and inclined his head briefly. “Very sad story,” he continued at length, giving me time to fully digest the majestic vista before us. “He said that he and his lover had always planned to have this house, but that the boy concerned had been taken away from him. And yet he pursued that dream, purchasing this house with his parents’ money. They found him swinging from the railings of the staircase. Hanged himself, you see. We’ve been unable to sell the house since then. They say – they say that his ghost lingers, waiting for that boy to return.”

“What makes him so sure the boy will,” I murmured, nodding my head, transfixed now by the rising marble of the railings, and by the romantic light of the candelabra. I glanced at my companion, who shrugged uneasily. I smiled and moved into the centre of the hallway, spinning slow circles as I gazed up, trying to pinpoint once again the pinnacle of the roof.

Back at the realtor’s office, he seemed shocked when I said that I would take the house, cash sale. I wrote him a cheque for the entire amount.

“But – it’s haunted,” he insisted. I laughed a little and nodded my head.

“I know,” I whispered, voice grating, sounding like gravel as I spoke. Pulling my trench coat around me, purple silk flashed in the afternoon sun. I shook his hand, confirming the deal. “I’ll expect the paperwork within the week.”

*

I stood in the driveway and peered up at the leaded windows of my Gothic mansion. I laughed softly to myself. It had taken me forty-five years, but I was back here again. The heavy doors loomed in the fading sunlight, but I ran my fingers across them as if they were old friends. I had travelled the world, seen many sights and many strange things, and yet these solid oak doors felt like home. We had stood here together just once, sheltering from the rain. His lips had found mine, and my back had crashed against the doors as his wet hand slid inside my pants. His tongue had been hot against mine, his fingers freezing against my skin, but blood and passion had fuelled us both. Giggling against one another’s throats, clinging to one another – unsure whether rain or sweat plastered our hair to our faces – we had vowed that we would live here together.

It had surprised me that the house had been sold with its ghost intact. My boots echoed lonely in the hallways and up the stairs. The crystal glittered weakly in the moonlight, casting a melancholy glow across the floors and cavorting playfully with the ghosts in the marble. The moonlight filtered through the dusty windows and haunted the corners of rooms, casting long silver shadows throughout the house.

And yet still I smiled. I imagined him here, sitting in peaceful stillness as he waited for me to return. Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months. He was young, and yet he wasted away waiting for me. I was twenty-four, and there was no coming back. They sectioned me, locked me away for murder. I didn’t do it, didn’t kill anyone, but the doctors declared that I was ‘unstable’; I was ‘a threat’. They locked me away until I forgot who I was. Can enough money buy someone insanity and a criminal record? Brad’s parents never liked me, that much is certain beyond all question.

His brief period of residence still seemed marked indelibly on the furnishings. I smiled as I found his things, pulling back dust sheets and opening draws. His chair, the writing bureau that he had treasured; his dining table, made from solid teak and shipped from the other side of the world at great expense. Nothing was too much effort. Even with it mouldering furniture and its smell of damp decay, the house spoke of so much promise and so many broken dreams.

*

I knew the whole sad story before the estate agent had even begun to speak. Myth and legend intertwined around that house. He wasn’t the first, people whispered. No, a long while before him, a boy had done the same thing – Brad’s predecessor’s girlfriend had moved out of state for college, and in a fit of despair the boy had done exactly as Brad had. His parents came home from a night out, only to hear music blasting from his bedroom. About to shout, his mother lost her voice when she saw her seventeen year old son’s lifeless body dangling from the railing of the stairs. Her partner, staunch and manly, cut the boy down and his mother cradled that stiff lifeless figure to her chest. Bereavement drove her mad. She overdosed on prescription valium six months later. Her husband, but not the boy’s natural father, took his shot gun into the yard with him, and blew his brain’s out beneath an unforgiving October moon.

The moon would have cast Brad’s face into beautiful silver relief when he hung himself with rope bought from the hardware store a week beforehand. Brad had a poet’s timing. He had waited for four years before deciding that I was not returning. He had the mood right, the setting. The house was locked securely, shutters fastened against the night. A note to me, penned in his beautiful scrawling script, and another for his parents, both written in blood red ink. The tail of the g swooped to underline my name, although crimson had faded to dull brown when the police finally tracked me down. He wore funereal black, they said, his thin frame clad in a three piece suit. He had scorned a tie. The chandelier glittered faintly yellow, refracting its light in every crystal drop. The only thing that seemed out of place, read the coroner’s report, was the music. Unspecified in the documentation, my gut instinct was confirmed by his mother, who pointed one long decadent purple talon at me, her eyes full of malicious ire.

“You,” she hissed, her eyes blazing. He had been dead for seven years when I first learnt of his passing. “Even without being here, you stole by baby from me. You and your music. You and your – your love!”

And I knew. The music that hadn’t fit the scene of his death had been meant for me to know.

*

I trailed languid fingers over cold white stone, the hem of my coat fluttering around my ankles as I climbed the stairs. I could feel him with me without saying a word, without asking him permission to break the sanctity of almost fifty years. I hadn’t come here when I learnt what had happened. I had seen his grave, kissed its cold granite headstone with its curiously dead inscription. I had pined silently for him and vowed that I would move on, that I wouldn’t waste my time on mourning when I could have done nothing to help.

And I did. I fell in love and travelled the world with my partner. We saw snow fall at Bergen-Belsen, where I couldn’t help but remember what I’d lost; we wandered the grimy back alleys of London, re-enacting scenes from our favourite plays; we experienced Fall in New England and saw spring break heady across Galway Bay. We owned houses in Paris, in Naples and Brussels. He knew people in Russia and Turkey. He had contacts in Japan and Greece. We were never short of places to go. If we kept moving, I didn’t have to think of the house my lost love and I had built our dreams around.

But time wore us both down, and eventually he said he needed to return home. I tried to laugh, to act my part – which home? I asked. He smiled weakly and wrapped his arms around me, his beard tickling my cheek. California, he said. He needed the sun again. He said he needed to see Mission Viejo one last time. I nodded uneasily, and was there with him when cancer rang the death knell.

So I drifted back to LA, and inexorably back to the house. I stood at dusk in front of it, and strained my eyes ever upwards. I laughed to myself and scuffed my toes in the gravel and the dust. Overrun and uncared for, it appeared a shell of itself even more than it had when together we had vowed to make it beautiful again. I pulled my coat tight around my body, and felt its desolation echoed in my tired bones. And I promised myself that I would see it in all its glory one final time.

*

It was always like this for us. For me. This one night of the year was meant for remembering, for thinking – for reflecting on the past and on the dead, and praying that just this one night they’d have the power to come back. Just for a moment. Just for you to say that you were sorry… Just long enough to say I love you one more time.

I sat on the top step, just the one light in the grand hallway on. It spilled its yellow glare across the floor and down the steps, driving away the mysterious shadows and the memories built on emptiness. I smiled and pushed myself to my feet, turning slowly. I was a fool – what did I honestly expect? To come back here and find him still waiting, leaning easily against the banister as his lips twisted into their familiar smile?

I ran tired, coarse hands across my face and shook my head. Too late for apologies now. The past was best left alone, and I had been a fool to come here at all. And yet, as I turned, I felt someone watching. I could feel a presence there with me. I knew it could only be him, and I felt the smile flicker on my lips. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t move, but it was his voice, crystal clear in my mind – silver like the moonlight and cold as the grave, but touched with him all the same.

‘You never came,’ it whispered, and I nodded my head sadly. ‘I waited for you, but you never came back. There was nothing here without you. Only your records, and this house…’

“There are no excuses,” I said, glancing into the mirror opposite. I could see his outline, flickering iridescently, clinging to a shape that I knew I gave it. I saw me as well, my grey hair, the lines around my eyes, the elasticity gone from my skin. The years were kind, but there’s no cure for old age, really.

‘I – I wanted you to come back,’ his voice whispered once more, he shape flickering wildly as emotion flared within me. ‘I believed in you.’

“I came as soon as I could…”

‘Too late,’ he accused, and I felt the anger inside of me, although he only voiced what I knew I felt. ‘You came too late. You could have saved me, Chester, but you didn’t.’

“I couldn’t,” I protested, “I couldn’t.”

He nodded sagely, pressing translucent fingers to his lips as he moved towards me. His brown eyes gazed at me in the mirror, and I ached to be able to touch him one last time. His smile broke my heart in two.

‘We had such dreams,’ he said, standing beside me now. His eyes flicked to the stairway and the chandelier. Nostalgia seeped from him. ‘We had such plans for this place. I wanted to make those dreams come true. So that this could be our home when you were released, but…’ His sigh rustled, dust settling as a breath that had never been drawn was exhaled. ‘My mom. She said you weren’t coming. That you had forgotten me, abandoned me. I should marry, she said. Move into a proper house, with central heating and a built in garage.’ He laughed bitterly and lowered his eyes before glancing back into the mirror again. ‘All I wanted was you. And it was all I couldn’t have. Death seemed easier, somehow. Easier than marriage, easier than waiting. I was so tired of waiting for you. It was your CD. Did you know that? You used to play it all the time. I had it on repeat as I tidied the house one last time. I never thought I’d still be waiting for you now. Because – because I had to know you were okay. I had to know that you hadn’t wasted away as I did without you.’

I swiped at the tears on my cheeks and reached out toward the mirror. “Noting felt the same without you,” I whispered, screwing my eyes shut, shaking my head as I tried to push these thoughts away. I was too old to be pining for lost love. I was forty-five years too late to save him now.

‘I’m always here,’ he said, and for a brief instance I felt a feather-light frost against my cheek, and a cold that spread chills around my heart. ‘You’ve never let me go,’ said a voice I could no longer see. ‘You kept me in here and never let me rest. And I’m tired, Chester. I love you, but I’m tired…’

His words made perfect sense to me as well. The October moon spread her beautiful arms wide to embrace lost souls on this one night. I pressed my fingers to my lips and hung my coat across the mirror. My feet found their own way down the corridors to a bedroom – his bedroom – and sleep drew me silently into its embrace as I lay my head against the pillow. I could feel him with me still, watching me as I slept.

And if I strained my ears, I could hear faint strains of that CD drifting down the corridor. I smiled as I slept, knowing he would be there with me when I awoke. And knowing also that, when life departed and death slipped in, I would still have that CD and the memories of Brad that had never faded.

FIN

© FyrMaiden 31.10.2004