Title: and these shadows keep on changing
Characters/Pairings: Jimmy, Housestiel
Rating: PG
Summary: Jimmy is looking for a way out. Jimmy is looking for an answer. At least one of the two has to exist.
Word Count: 411
Notes: House of Leaves plotless and pointless fusion, the terrible offspring of a prompt on JBB's adopt-a-bunny post and my own misfiring imagination. Title taken from poe's "Haunted", in turn from the album accompanying House of Leaves.

Further note that I don't own the book and it's been at least three years since I last read it, so be warned for - I don't know, the mauling of at least one of your favorite fandoms.

"But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place...when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose . . . This mechanism being observed . . . the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place of other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use."

-William Paley, Natural Theology

The dark presses down on him, absolute.

Darkness is easy to laugh at with when it is under the bed, an overactive imagination rattling in the closet. See Claire, the monster isn't real. There the dark is only an absence, a hollowed out thing harnessed so tamely to the nearest light switch always within reach.

Here it is a presence pulsing like blood through the labyrinthine rooms and hallways, the stairs that start and end abruptly as they feel like it. The shadows do not so much as dissipate under the wavering beam of light as peel away, layer from oily layer. He might as well be walking through the guts or the brains or the veins of a great beast, a behemoth of legend; its breaths in the thudding beat of his heart, its eyes watching in the walls, mouthing the air against his skin.

His watch has stopped. Intellectually he understands that all it means is that it is broken, fallen victim to the fall or perhaps even the strange will of the house, the alien and incomprehensible intelligence that must have first raised these smoothly black walls.

But he can almost believe that it tells the truth, that the world has ended while he gropes, will always grope futilely, for a way out, time stripped of its larger context; or that it has always been devoid of such and from the beginning there had always only been the house, and him, scuttling through the endlessly changing and mockingly random paths, the eternal symbol of the insignificant mortal with the boot of the universe in its face.

The hallway seems endless; the air grows colder with every step. This house and everything in it should be impossible, and yet it is shockingly real. He had kissed his wife goodbye and tasted her on his lips and yet already the indeterminable time and distance between them feels more and more like the barrier between reality and a dream, vivid and beautiful but, ultimately, a mere illusion.

Jimmy breathes in; around him the house breathes out into his mouth, filling up his lungs, the emptiness in between his bones. The dark fits into his body like a glove, cradling his heart in icy hands. His skin feels as thin as lantern paper over an open flame.

The light in his hand dwindles just that much more. Jimmy goes on walking, the shadows parting ahead and closing behind in his wake, patient.

-end-

Ending Notes: Cross-posted to my LJ where 'house' is highlighted in blue as it should be.