Time After Time
Author's Note: Changed up the timeline a little bit so that Trish and Theo meet after Nell's funeral. Everything else should be consistent with the canon.
...
After the first time, they collapsed on the bed side by side, covered in a slick sheen and still smelling faintly of alcohol. Their bodies hummed in unison as their heart rates slowed. She sat up to snatch a t-shirt from the pile on her floor and noticed that there was still a soft grin on her lips.
When Theo tugged them back over her wrists, Trish asked her about the gloves.
Hill House was always unnaturally cold to her. It started in her hands, and gradually spread throughout her body. A chill, sometimes, like her mother said, as if she were standing in front of an open refrigerator; at other times, it was as if someone with an ice cube in their mouth were blowing gently on the back of her neck. She pulled hats and sweaters and overshirts out of the boxes her parents stored in the back of her closet, marked "WINTER" in hastily sketched black marker. Even as her siblings fanned themselves in their short-sleeves and tank tops, there were times Theo thought she might never stop shivering.
Eventually, she learned it was about proximity. But especially her hands-
Theo did a lot of reading that summer, each of the Crain siblings enveloped in their own worlds within the new house and no one else her age to befriend. The five of them were in and out of each other's company and adventures, appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye. So she busied herself with books. One told her that the human hand contains around 100,000 nerves, and that touch was the least understood of all the senses. Another introduced her to the fantastical being called an empath.
She had always been keenly adept at reading her family. For most of her childhood, she didn't realize that they didn't all understand. Sometimes her sisters said things that made their dad or Steven double-take or squint in that way that meant something was off. She knew that her mom's headaches usually came right before she told the kids that she needed a quiet day to herself.
She felt Nell's joy when she finally gave in and agreed to have a tea party with her. Luke's nerves momentarily became her own when he asked to have Abigail for a sleepover, despite her own relative ambivalence to the situation and lack of stake in the matter.
The longer she spent in that house, the more she realized that she was becoming aware of things that could not be explained. Things she didn't necessarily want to know.
When she traced the lines of certain panels of wallpaper, or when she pretended to shake the hand of one of the statues for the amusement of her siblings, or when she lowered herself down the ladder to the hidden cellar; always there were voices that were unable to speak, but told her nonetheless. Some were angry, some confused, some sad. All of them were freezing.
She didn't realize how much she cried that summer until they left.
It was so cold in that house. A concentrated chill that always started in her hands. The longer she was there, the closer she was-
She tried to believe it when she chalked it up to poor circulation.
When her mom gave her the gloves, when their hands brushed as one handed off to the other, she felt a rush of love so strong she thought she might stop breathing altogether. Then Olivia folded her hands in her lap, and the overwhelming nature of the feeling subsided, and Theo's lips spread into a rare, genuine smile. Her feelings were her own in the instant before she slipped the gloves over her hands as she looked at her mother looking at her. She was seen. She was understood. And she was loved.
And the gloves let her know, for the first time since they moved in that summer, that what she was feeling came from herself.
...
After the second time, Trish asked if Theo had any siblings.
Theo didn't know whether to say she had three or four. At her faltering, Trish reached a hand out from where she still lay on her side, propped up on an elbow with a sheet haphazardly covering her torso. Theo shied away from the touch. She closed her eyes and sighed, immediately regretting the reaction. She hoped that her movement would come off as casual and coincidental, but she knew that the shift in her shoulders was unmistakable.
When they were little, Nell was prone to nightmares. Even more so after they moved into Hill House. Despite the "twin thing" with Luke, more often than not, when Nell woke up in a fit of fear, it was Theo's room she padded down the hall to seek comfort in. As much as Theo valued undisturbed sleep, consoling her sister made her feel warmer.
When they were a little older, and uncertainty was the only feeling she was certain of, she and Nell stayed in and watched television together while their other siblings went out and about. On nights when Aunt Janet worked late, they flipped channels to watch the shows their aunt deemed "too adult" for them and made a pact to only watch them together. Those nights were filled with half-guilty giggles and conspiratorial smirks.
When two girls kissed on screen, all of Theo's muscles tensed at once. When she swallowed the lump that formed in her throat, she was sure that the sound reverberated throughout the house. She glanced at Nell out of the corner of her eye with bated breath. Was she uncomfortable? Grossed out? Enraged?
But then, sweet Nellie just settled further into her side with a gentle smile, noting how in love the characters seemed.
When all five of them were finally college-age and older, they came together over Christmas, and over several bottles of whiskey. They all laughed, some of them cried, two of them puked. With rosy cheeks, Theo lounged and drank and joked with her brothers and sisters. They were warm from the liquor and warm with each other.
And they loved each other completely.
When it became clear that Luke needed help, all of the Crain siblings dropped everything to be there for him. Theo was not the only one to feel pain similar to his when they saw him off to rehab. His struggle was profound. They wanted so deeply to help, and the knowledge that the hardest part of his recovery was ultimately something that he had to do alone broke each of their hearts independently.
When Nell fell in love with Arthur and couldn't wait to share her excitement. The night he proposed, Theo could hear Nell's elation through the phone. She said she couldn't remember the last time her heart had felt so full. Theo could tell that Nell had never been so happy. Theo had never been so happy for someone.
When Arthur died, and Nell's despair crashed over all of them like a tidal wave, Theo felt her own heart uncontrollably splinter, then crack, then bleed.
When Nell never recovered from her grief.
When Theo placed her hand on Nellie's forehead at the wake, and for the first time in her life, felt nothing at all.
...
After the third time (the second time that night), Trish twisted a lock of Theo's hair delicately and mused that it must have been hard for the Crain parents to lose Nell. Her eyes trained over Theo's face meticulously, with painstaking caution.
Theo made a noise that hovered between a scoff and a snort as she suppressed the urge to make a comment about the one who actually survived being too disconnected from reality to even process what happened. Trish placed a kiss on her shoulder. Theo hesitated, leaned in to kiss her fully, then stretched an arm out to her bedside table and pinched what remained of a spliff between her thumb and middle finger. She let out a long billow of breath as she attempted to light it.
She didn't have to touch her to know that her mother was bursting with love. When they were young, she told all the kids about how she grew up as an only child and knew all her life that she wanted a big family. That her heart was constantly producing love, and she she knew she was meant to have a whole handful of kids to share it with. Olivia Crain adored her children so much, the love alone nearly drove her insane.
When she grew up, Theo never felt like she had any sort of epiphany or realization about who she was or who she was attracted to. As kids, their parents gave Theo and her siblings a great deal of freedom. Expression and individuality was a given. Their parents watched as they ran, and played, and became without impeding on their individual progressions toward personhood.
It was hindsight that convinced her that her mom, and dad, knew who she was from the get go, and that they never, not for a second, let it affect how they loved and parented her.
In the years when it became clear that the world was not necessarily like her family in their mindset, Theo's brain echoed with the words her mother told her one day that summer. "You can talk to me. About anything."
"About anything."
Anything.
As much as they tried, both Hugh and Olivia were so busy that summer at Hill House, they could never have seen the full extent to which Theo and her siblings were affected by the simple act of existing there. The way that their realities became twisted, the things they saw and felt. The fists that took hold of their hearts that clenched just a bit tighter when they left, that learned to squeeze even harder when they were most vulnerable beyond the walls that contained the essence of who they were for those couple of months.
The night they left, none of them were ever sure of what they saw. Were their memories tainted by their pre-adolescent imaginations? Were they participants in a collective nightmare? Was that really Mom in the window? Were they hallucinating those other figures in the shadows? Was Mom becoming one of the shadows?
The four of them all cried together in the car. "What about Mommy?" Where was she? Why would they leave her behind? How could they?
But even as Theo wept with her brothers and sisters, she knew. Their mother was gone. She was too far away to reach. The house had taken her, and she had become a part of it. Even if she wanted to, Olivia Crain would not be able to find her way back. She was lost. The walls had closed themselves around her, and there was no way out.
Their dad told them to lock the door behind him at the motel. They nervously exchanged accounts of what they had witnessed as they'd been ushered from the house, then one by one, drifted into silent contemplation as they struggled to comprehend the situation they found themselves in.
After a few minutes, Theo made her way to the singular window in the room and eased the curtain just enough to the side to peek out at the parking lot. The neon green "Vacancy" sign illuminated her father's silhouette, bent over the steering wheel in the unmoving car, the shaking of his body barely, but indisputably, perceptible.
...
After the fourth time, they both took several minutes to wind down their breathing to a normal rate and were bubbling with satisfied chuckles. Trish asked, breathless, and not really expecting an answer, "God, how do you do that?" Theo glanced at her gloves dangling over the side of her bedside table and allowed herself a sly grin.
Her first time, she almost didn't take her gloves off. Just kissing felt as though it was verging on overwhelming her senses. Eventually she realized that was just how love was sometimes.
Her first time, after she took her gloves off, she thought she might die. The sensations she experienced felt like they overtook the whole of her body and then some. She gasped for air, and her eyes widened as she feared her heart might stop. And then she let her breath back out, and she felt more human than she could remember feeling since before her first pair of gloves.
She could feel what the girl was feeling, but even more so, she felt what was inside of her, and she let herself bring the two together in a way that she hadn't been sure would be possible until then.
For the first time, feeling another person felt more like a gift than a burden.
...
After the fifth time, Trish said, "I think you know how I feel."
Theo placed a hand on Trish's cheek and traced the planes of her face with her thumb. She looked, and she felt, and she knew.
She whispered, "Tell me anyway."