TASERGAZER!!! (thank you for humoring me with this pairing that I love so much. <3)
2. ‘Wait…if you’re making pancakes…whose footsteps am I hearing upstairs?’
Pairing: Darcy/Heimdall
Rating: T
The house had looked sweet when they’d found it and Heimdall had been tolerant of the candy colors that decorated the old painted lady trimmings along the roof and around the deck. They thought it’d been empty and on the market because of the cost of fixing up a house in the historic district.
Or at least, Darcy had thought that.
Heimdall had probably seen them peering out of windows, watching from corners. But he kept that thing sort of close to his chest. Ghosts were his business. History was hers.
_
The first time had been at breakfast, the morning after their boxes were moved in and they’d christened the staircase on the way to the bed. (And then the bed after a short rest.)
She’d been lining her shelves in the library with books- the murder mysteries, the non-fiction, the erotic romances that her husband read to her in his deep, rich notes until she lost her patience for listening. Heavy thunking steps paced the hallway above her head which meant that either Heimdall had lost something (like his natural sense of grace) or…
She stuck her head out of the door, grimaced at the shocking mustard colored embossed leather wallpaper in the hall (she hadn’t made her mind up about all the leather on the walls yet) and smelled butter frying. She padded across the worn floorboards to the kitchen to find Heimdall at the stove, naked back flexing as he flipped a pancake into the air with a little flourish.
“Wait…if you’re making pancakes…whose footsteps am I hearing upstairs?” she asked. Which was silly. She already knew the answer.
Heimdall looked up at the ceiling for a long moment. “They’re all right,” he assured her.
“Dolly,” she said with a sigh and he looked over his shoulder at her, arching a brow.
“You said you wanted an old house,” he said.
And he had warned her. He could see ghosts, ghosts could see him, and generally they were a lot more vocal around him. It was a thing. A thing she had signed up for.
“I love this house,” she said, as firm and stubborn as the pacing steps that rattled the lamp hanging above them.
_
It was okay though. Feathers were ruffled in the first week and two cheap vases were broken in the wake of negotiations with the residents of the house.
Darcy and Heimdall saved sharing showers for the dead of night when the prankster was less likely to flash freeze them by a sudden change of temperature in the water.
Darcy’s alphabetization of her library was a lost cause too.
_
She mowing the lawn while Heimdall tinkered with his old junker truck. She turned a corner and discovered a man in the garage with her husband.
“Dolly, there’s-”
“We are running late,” the man said, straw hat tipping on his head, white summer suit fluttering in a breeze that the painfully hot summer day was lacking.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” Heimdall muttered, drawing his fingers back from the engine with a hiss. “Don’t mess with the alternator, please.”
Darcy blinked and the man in the white suit - whose eyes were foggy and smudged and whose edges were melting away into the background - took a long drag from a cigarette, before pursing his lips to blow out invisible smoke.
She went back to pushing the mower across the tall grass.
_
She was carrying a basket of laundry in her arms, down the basement stairs, when the door slammed shut behind her and the lock clicked.
“Dolly!” she shouted. “HEIMDALL!”
The air nipped at her cheeks, turning frigid around her in a quick burst of cold.
She plopped her butt right down onto the step beneath her, squeezing her arms around her basket and bracing her heels on the step as she listened to footsteps thundering above her. There was a hissing from below, an angry type of slithering, agitated flicks and whips and Darcy tried to muffle the shriek that burst forth as something cold and brittle wrapped around her ankle.
“Darcy!” she heard from the kitchen. The doorknob rattled loudly behind her, and something from below seemed to chuckle in time.
“I am not alone, babe!!” Darcy said, kicking her leg and trying to shake off whatever had her in its grip.
There were three hard cracks against the door and Darcy screamed as she was dragged down one step and then another, her tailbone hitting hard against the wood.
Her breaths hiccuped in her chest as the door swung open, hitting the stairwell wall with a bang and spilling light down onto the bone white face staring up at Darcy, eyes black hollows and mouth a dark, open smear. The body was twisting and churning, spilling down the steps like an oil slick over the back of some kind of warping, morphing beast.
Dark arms, twined with gold light, wrapped underneath her armpits and around her chest, yanking her back with a sharp tug. Darcy’s ankle popped and the laundry went tumbling down the stairs as the phantom growled and snarled, snaking back into the dark shadows of the deep basement.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Heimdall breathed as he scooped her up and dashed them both up into the shining sunlight of the kitchen.
“Get me out, get me out,” she chanted, ignoring the throb of her ankle, the red finger marks that were darkening to purple, skin swelling up around.
“I didn’t realize that was there,” Heimdall assured her, as he carried her out to the backyard.
Darcy twisted in his hold and clung to his shoulders for the long minutes it took for her heart to slow its racing rhythm. He dropped to the deck steps with a deep whoosh of breath.
“I will do the laundry while we live here,” he said, tone almost reasonable if she hadn’t seen the wide whites of his eyes looking dazedly out at the tidy yard.
“I like this house,” Darcy said, still stubborn. “But I would like it better without that particular resident.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Heimdall said, nodding for a long time. He pressed his lips to her forehead and they sat together outside for another hour.
