Mortem Obire - Chapter 1
(Pasted here, for easy reading)
EDIT- now that ao3 is back again, the full fic can be found here-
https://archiveofourown.org/works/58939969/chapters/150243712
In these trying times, and inspired by @auguryintheether’s suggestion, I thought I’d pop together a mood board for my Supernatural Ghoulcy Dark Academia AU… and pop my google drive ch1 here. I always do extra checks in the ao3 editor so if there’s any errors, I apologise and fingers crossed they’re not in the ao3 version 💕
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The library was quiet.
It was always quiet, this late, but it felt especially morose as I poured over newspapers and ancient forums, tying together whatever scraps I could from the meagre information available. Staring into the ancient, deep-set monitor like it contained the mysteries of the universe, rather than a badly formatted website on what somebody, too many years ago, considered important local history. My notebook was a sea of scribbled theories and half-baked ideas, the occasional location circled and underlined. Places to research, rabbit holes to scramble down. More and more things to do, more and more things that would inevitably prove useless.
By rights, I should have been pouring over the largely forgotten engineering textbook that poked out of my satchel, but the anniversary of my father’s disappearance was looming and impossible to ignore. I’d done my best, but I’d never been able to ignore my own desperate yearning for answers. I’d promised my brother - younger, but with the sarcasm and frown lines of a much older man - that coming to this city was pure coincidence; that it just felt right.
That I’d fallen in love with the old, stone buildings and the quaint waterway that passed through the campus - instead of the fact it was the town our father had vanished in, so long ago. The place we’d been abandoned, two young children alone in a hotel room, finally found by a startled, terrified room service.
He hadn’t believed me.
He hadn’t believed me, and I knew that. The sheer look he’d given me when I’d said I was even attending the open day…My brother wasn’t one to hide his emotions well, especially when those emotions veered towards complete and utter scepticism, a single eyebrow raised as I told him it was a pre-organised tour, that I’d be going to a series of potential colleges; with other less…traditionally educated students. Older students, like myself, homeschooled or raised rural - also like myself - or ones who just wanted the comfort of an organised tour. Who didn’t want to spend weeks hunting down campuses, booking trains or driving for hours.
Betty had almost cried with happiness at the arrival of the hefty acceptance packet - not knowing it was the only school I’d applied for, the one I’d known in my soul was for me.
Norm had simply scoffed, tucking his book under his arm and carrying it, and his breakfast, onto the back porch. Unable to even look me in the eyes, even as our surrogate mother fussed me, shouting the news to our neighbours before I’d had a chance to even process it.
The library felt like home now though, the worn chairs and peeling plaster somehow more comfortable and familiar than my dorm ever could be.
Maybe it was the people.
I wasn’t used to being alone. We’d grown up close knit, surrounded by people, in a hustling, bustling little neighbourhood - everyone in everyone else’s business. No other business to focus on, really, than each others. I’d hardly ever been alone, even before dad vanished. We’d lived together beside Betty and the others for our whole lives, so it had made sense for her to take Norman and I in when he…
When he vanished.
When he left us, alone in a motel room hours from home; chasing…something.
I stared at the local history page before me til my eyes burned, even though the many mentions of the supernatural within its pages proved to me that the author was a hack. So still the motion sensor lights cut off, so late that the arrival of a paper to-go cup in my peripheral left my heart pounding, a scream catching in my throat.
Eyes on us at even the barest bit of noise.
“You should have been home like, two hours ago,” a warm voice chastised, “no, scratch that, three. Three hours ago. I told you that joining the College Paper was a bad idea.”
My relief was palpable even as I fought to catch my breath from the shock, the warm voice as familiar as this place, by now. “Hi, Max”
He stayed close, hand warm on my shoulder - when had it gotten so cold in here? I hadn’t even noticed, coat laying forgotten on the back of one of the ancient chairs. I glanced around, sighing at the sight of one of the temperamental windows at the furthest edge of the room, obviously pushed open by the wind and closed the page before me before my friend caught sight of “proof of vampires!” Or “mothman, sighted.” It was stupid of me to have been sat letting such rubbish into my conciousness, especially as the wind picked up outside, rain running in thick rivulets down the ancient single glazing.
No wonder he’d startled me. No wonder my heart still raced, even as I smiled towards him, noting the start of stubble across his chin. It was no different than reading ghost stories under my covers as a child, a flashlight in my shaking hand.
Max seemed amused by my shock regardless, though, nudging the cup he brought with him, the one that had appeared as I'd been reading about local legends, the one that had scared me out of my skin. Coffee. It smelt amazing as I lifted it to my face, inhaling deeply and rubbing at my eyes - only thinking of my mascara when it was very obviously too late, a smear of black across the heel of my hand. The cup was hot, edging on scalding - but not burnt, or uncomfortably viscous. This was good coffee, so I knew he hadn’t bought it here, and I let the warmth of it soak into my chilled fingers, wishing I’d noticed the open window
“I haven’t joined the paper yet, Max.”
“Then I’m not going to ask what you’re doing here so late,” he groaned, stretching til his neck popped, “because I know other people on your course, bookworm, and they’re partying like everyone else. Like we should be.”
He flopped down into one of the sagging wood and leather seats, legs stretched out, one foot crossed over the other. I had no idea how he always wore combat boots. I’d tried Doc Martens once and had nursed the blisters for way too long to consider them again - and they’d technically been a hand-me down, already broken in. My own shoes - a scuffed pair of Mary Jane’s that had been my mother's at my age - were askew, abandoned beside me a few hours before. The rules of propriety were abandoned at this time of night, and students in their pyjamas was a common sight; so the sheer outline of my toes through my tights was the least of anyone’s concerns.
Max stared down at the table beside me - where I’d thankfully been finishing off an essay before getting distracted by my own errant curiosity - scattered with an array of post-its and printed sections and crossed out words, and then at the time on his phone.
I knew what he was going to ask before he asked it, the question he continually threw my way. “When did you last eat, Lucy?”
“I…”
What time was it?
He glanced down at the discarded wrapper beside me, the twitch of his lips giving away the lie that was his glare. At 19 he was a year younger than me, but acted so often like my parent, like I was a naive child who needed guidance to navigate the complexities of this world we inhabited, so different from the one I’d grown up in.
“Something that wasn’t a protein bar, Lucy? Honestly, I don’t know how you even eat those things, they’re not even good protein bars! I think they were last popular in like, the 50’s.”
I returned his mock glare, sliding another out of my pocket. One he immediately reached for, hands grabbing in my direction as I laughed, twisting til the seat beneath me groaned in protest. The cracking russet leather had survived worse though, I imagined, and didn’t give up on me today.
“I’ve only got one more with me, I’m not-“ I snorted as his chair threatened to topple, “I’m not sharing!”
“I don’t want to share, you-“
A shush, and we choked on our laughter, fighting giggles. The library was unusually full, though it wasn’t the latest i'd stayed; and the usually dead-eyed mathematics students who tended to camp out at the back of the room glared at the intrusion to their peace. I got it - the third years were studying for exam season, and even at this late hour they didn’t want to be distracted.
“They’re an acquired taste,” I hissed, waving it in front of him and grinning as he refused, wrinkling his nose in displeasure.
“I grew up eating real food, Ms Homeschool, not expired army rations.”
I scoffed, ready to tell him exactly where he could stick it, but he’d already started moving away from my little spot, and his pointed glance at the clock told me why. I slid my notebook into my bag, collecting my scattered notes as carefully as I could and hoisted it over my shoulder, holding the powdery bar between my teeth as I bent to quickly re-fasten my shoes. Max had picked up my coffee and handed it back to me as I caught up, his wide back looking especially, well, wide in his coat. As wide as the smile he always had ready for me, whenever we saw each other. I didn’t need the visual queue of his duffle bag to tell me he’d been at the gym, for all his teasing he was twice the hard worker I was - I’d never seen the man take a day off.
We’d met on the first day of college - a cliche if ever I’d seen one, I know. I’d met that stunningly wide back before I’d met his charming smile or his warm, brown eyes - a moving box held comfortably in arms obviously used to hard graft. His childhood friend, Dane, was my roommate, and when they’d realised I was alone, they both adopted me.
Their cheerful little puppy, who only required occasional rescuing from the addictive clutches of the library.
“I might be homeschooled,” I teased, shoving my hip into his as we walked, “but I’m still beating your grades.”
He side-eyed me. “You spent your entire childhood in the ass end of nowhere with nothing to do but study, Lucy, I’m not even rising to that bait.”
He was right, I had. I couldn’t help but feel that regardless of where I’d have grown up, how I’d grown up, I’d have still made it here. Max enjoyed his course, but me? I loved it. I lived and breathed engineering, and had done since I was a girl - since I’d tied the sleeves of my overalls around my waist and had wrenched our water system back into obedience. I’d seen, in real-time, how much of an impact it had had on our little commune and had known in an instant that I wanted to do the same, elsewhere.
Water purification and radiation mitigation.
I’d been told that picking my third year dissertation project topics was pointless, that I’d go on my placements and fall in love with something else - army R&D or building design, but I’d always been utterly fascinated by the more human elements of my course, the possibilities it had on so many underprivileged lives.
“Did you hear that?”
I didn’t, but glanced about, regardless. The quad was empty, save for the benches and the bushes, and the statue that loomed over us in its centre. Just as quiet as it always was, save for the soft rushing of water in the distance; the lampposts above just as temperamental too, casting us into occasional darkness. “No?”
It was my turn to grin at Max, to launch a teasing hip against his. It was dark, summer heading towards its inevitable conclusion; the sun dipping below the horizon earlier and earlier, but this was my time. I loved the stillness, the peace of it. The way the air felt cooler, crisper, the wet mugginess of daytime giving way to a comfortable calm night. It had been a long time since the shadows across the ancient quad worried me, since I’d seen nightmares in my peripheral.
The fear I could see across Max’s handsome features was charming.
Such a big man, and yet worried by some sort of animal, scurrying into the bins behind the library. I reached for his arm, sliding my hand into the crook of his elbow and feeling a slight shortcut at the pure muscle I found there, “It’s probably some raccoons or something, I’ll get you home safe and sound, okay?”
“You’re what, 150lb soaking wet?”
I went to detach, reluctantly sliding my fingers from the thick wool of his coat and fought my grin as he tightened, instead, keeping me pinned in place.
“Anyway, you-“
He paused again, and I did hear whatever it was, this time. A dragging sound, the squeak of a shoe against concrete.
Not an animal. Thoughts raced through my mind, half-baked gossip I’d ignored in my arrogance, whispered narratives between the other women in my course that someone had been attacked, that Campus Security weren’t doing their job, that they didn’t feel safe, after dark. Walking home from parties with their keys between their fingers, wary of what, or more aptly, who, lurked in the gloom.
I gripped Max’s elbow harder, glad that the lamp posts had blessed us with working circuitry as we remained lit, rather than entirely cast into darkness. Haloed in the false promise of safety, as if the light would somehow protect us from whatever lurked in the darkness. At once, unbidden, the pages I’d laughed at flickered in my mind, tall tales of supernatural entities haunting the shadows of the town. Those rumours twisted in my mind, heightened only by the glare of the intricately carved gargoyles, recessed into the rooftops above us.
“Hello?”
My voice echoed across the quad and Max immediately glared down at me, hissing under his breath to ask what the hell I thought I was doing, why in God's name I thought the best thing to do was shout.
“It’s just a person,” I argued - as much to myself as he - shrugging, the gesture hopefully hiding my discontent. “Probably a drunk, you wouldn’t believe-“
A figure stumbled from the bushes with a groan, eyes practically glowing in the lamplight as he stared across at us, stopping - or well, swaying, in his tracks. He was holding something, a…scarf, maybe, but from here I couldn’t see exactly what it was, or who it was. Just that they looked masculine, and drunk.
I pulled on Max’s arm, stepping backwards, away from the figure. My heart rate still high, even as reality sunk in - even as I knew those forums had been wrong, that they’d wheedled into my consciousness too easily.
“Just a drunk student, come on.”
“You shouldn’t keep walking about this late at night, Lucy,” he chastised, beside me, voice practically a mutter, as if the words were coming out as soon as he though them, with no time for enunciation or volume. “Call me from now on, okay? I don’t think I like the idea of you just being out alone, at night like this?”
I nodded, though was undecided as to whether my agreement was entirely an empty promise. I wasn’t naive, though I couldn’t understand why this time of day was any more or less dangerous than any other. I’d been raised to be kind to those around me, to treat them with trust, in the way I’d want to be treated, but I’d learned quickly - and with an almost disastrous almost mugging - that outside of the California desert that wasn’t quite the way it worked. Still, though, these strange, nighttime hours were mine. Not my natural ones, no, but the ones I’d claimed since starting here, since I’d found a strange sort of meditative zen past 8pm, surrounded by watermarked mahogany and the creak of those worn-down chairs. I felt safe out here in the starlit calm of dusk; and knew the bricks beneath my feet like old friends - I could, and had navigated it in the dead of night as easily as the dawn.
Tonight had been a rarity, the first time in weeks I’d felt anything akin to danger.
Still, he believed me; as most people did. I had one of those faces, or so I’d been promised, and Max held my hand right there in the crook of his arm all the way across the quad and towards the dorms, where the illuminated diners and bars in the distance seemed almost lurid in comparison. He was protective, almost to a fault - a wonderful characteristic in a friend but sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted…more. More than I did, more than I had the capacity to, if I was honest. I wasn’t against a casual dalliance - no, I’d had a thoroughly wonderful time with a member of the swim team a few weeks prior; hot and fast and pressed against his dorm room wall, somewhere between his champion medals and his battered posters. They’d jangled against one another in my ear as he’d taken me, which had been both oddly meditative and pretty distracting.
Still, that was a one-and-done, though he’d told me to text him.
Max… wouldn’t be. And whilst I admired that warm smile, that wide back…
“Food?”
The protein bar hadn’t filled me up, but now I’d been pulled from my natural habitat I was more focused on bed, rather than fries.
I shook my head, nodding towards the dorms. “Another time,” I rebuffed, ignoring the brief flash of something across his eyes. My fatigue had hit like a atom bomb, surprising and filled with devastation, and I didn’t have the capacity to worry whether it was sadness or hurt. “You were right to come get me, I’ve got a morning seminar with Wilzig first thing, then the introduction meeting with the paper. And it’s…” I checked my watch, another antique, another item from a lost decade, a forgotten era. “It’s 1am.”
Max only shook his head, taking advantage of the fact I’d removed my arm to check the time to throw his now freed limb over my shoulder. He smelt of sweat, and deodorant, and I wrinkled my nose, moving away just a fraction. “1am, and whilst that guy back there stumbles home from the bar I have to drag you away from the library and myself away from the squat rack. What exciting lives we live, eh?”
The dorm room wasn’t far now, a few lights still on like homing beacons in the dark. I could see our light was on too, Dane’s posters visible on the wall even from here, murky, dark rectangles promoting bands I wasn’t cool enough to know; and certainly hadn’t learned to enjoy. They teased me endlessly as I’d revealed a love of the classics, dancing around to the music their grandparents enjoyed.
I’d been deemed a hipster, until they’d learned I just didn’t know modern music, that I’d practically been raised underground.
Still, they’d been kind enough to tell Max to fetch me on the way home before I wasted away in that library, gathering dust.
