A/N: I wanted to write something for Meredith and didn't know what, so here's this. I'm really sad that we didn't get more of her ... I want to know why no one from her family collected her belongings from Eichen House.
Warnings for: mental health issues, ableism, death, pre-canon setting.
The title and the lyrics come from 'Hello Operator' by The White Stripes.
find a canary
a bird to bring my message home
carry my obituary
my coffin doesn't have a phone
Meredith is twelve the first time she hears someone else's voice in her head.
The day after paramedics drag her father from behind the wheel of his car, his body mangled and his eyes open and unseeing, Meredith hears his voice whispering in her ears.
Meredith. Baby girl.
She cries out - from surprise, not from fear. It's her father's voice; she isn't afraid. She'll later come to realize that she should have been.
("You imagined it, Meredith," her frazzled mother tells her later, and she doesn't believe it when Meredith argues that no, I didn't imagine it, he was there. I heard him.)
A week later, Meredith wakes up in the wee hours of the morning. She's not in her bed; instead, she's standing in the kitchen. The tile is cool under her bare feet, and she focuses on that as her hand moves of its own accord to the phone. She lifts the phone from the cradle and holds it to her ear, and she listens.
Meredith, her father says, his voice crackling, like he's in an area with very bad reception. I love you. Don't ever forget, baby.
Her mother finds her still standing there at dawn the next morning, phone pressed to her ear, listening to the dial tone with tears still damp on her cheeks.
After that, she's put in therapy. Her mother is convinced that she's simply reacting poorly to the strain of losing her dad; her doctor seems to agree, at first. But when Meredith won't budge - when she screams and cries and insists that no, the voice was real - his opinion of her begins to change.
She's put on medication. It doesn't work.
She starts sleepwalking beyond the confines of her own house. By the time she's fourteen, she has three major incidents of sleepwalking. Once, she wakes in her neighbor's cellar, the beginning of a scream rising in her throat; the stench of what is later revealed to be decomposition is rank and makes her gag. Her mother doesn't listen when Meredith begs her to call the police and report the dead girl in their neighbor's basement, but somehow she seems even more discomfited when Meredith places a tip herself and their neighbor is later hauled away in handcuffs.
("I talked to her," Meredith says. "On the phone." Her mother doesn't believe her, and neither does her doctor, and neither do the police. Nobody believes her.)
No matter how many pills they put her on, or how many scans they do of her brain, nothing changes. She keeps waking up in places she doesn't know, even when her mother invests in a heavy-duty security system to keep Meredith in the house. Her mother forbids her to use the phone without supervision, and Meredith starts finding herself standing in payphone booths with no number in mind, listening to whispers on the other end.
("I'm not crazy!" she screams, when her therapist broaches the topic of a care facility. Still, no one believes her, not even when she points to myths and legends and says, this is it. Please listen.)
Eichen House is cold and dark and full of whispers, but Meredith doesn't have a choice any more. The nurses and orderlies won't let her out, and if she gets upset, they don't take it as well as her mother and her doctor do.
It turns out, however, that escaping Eichen House is easy - well, it must be, because while she doesn't remember leaving, Meredith finds herself outside her house one evening with no real memory of getting there. She hurries up to the porch before anyone driving past can see her and haul her back to Eichen House, but she finds the front door ominously ajar. The house is a mess, drawers ransacked and valuables gone, and her mother lies cold and dead on the kitchen floor, her body spread-eagle on the same spot Meredith stood years ago, listening to her father's last words.
(When the police, alerted of her disappearance from Eichen House, finally find her, they drag her away from the phone kicking and screaming. "Let me talk to my mom," she begs, but it's useless; no one's listening.)