Again, I must give you some honesty. As far as the long-term this story has very little plot. I know of one thing that I want to happen eventually, but as for how all the loose ends will tie together- nope, nothing yet. If you have ideas please feel free to share.
I am quite pleased with myself though, getting a chapter up only ten days after I started writing this.
Thank you to MidnightLyoness, Kuroneko388, and Rebellion of the Kat for the reviews.
Chapter Two
All Work and No Play Makes Jill a Dull Girl
Sarah soon found that her childhood home was not, in fact, home. Toby was growing into a rambunctious nine-year-old and the center of her father and step mother's attentions and affections, just as she had always suspected him to be. Everyone expected her to have a job now that she was in the 'real world'. She could not find peace in that old two-story house of her childhood. She remembered why she had never come back over summer vacations. Staying at childhood house, searching half-heatedly for work left her tired most days and irrationally paranoid. She thought she heard the soft brush of wings in the darkness- a sound that should have been comforting because she surely would not hear an owl for they were such quiet birds- and the noise left her breathless and covered in goosebumps. In the corners of her eyes shadows moved. She slept without dreaming and never woke rested. Sometimes she thought she heard Toby, whose room shared a wall with hers, speaking to a man with an accent she couldn't place. But when she rushed into his room one day there was nothing and her brother looked at her as if she were insane, which she probably was. So she left. Went back to school for a summer and got a teaching credential because she couldn't think of anything else to do.
The high school a town over and an hour's drive away was willing to hire her, excited that they could get one person to teach both Advanced Placement Literature and the bi-weekly Painting class. She got a little house out there too, an updated key-turner that still held onto it's old charm. She spent a week painting the walls with bold colors, hoping to shock some liveliness back into her life. Another couple of days kept her busy shopping with her step-mother for furniture that Toby helped her arrange. He helped her when she took everything from her room at home with her, even giving her back her once-beloved Lancelot. She scattered the toys and the pictures throughout the house. Having the memory triggers less concentrated made seeing them easier, more pleasant and reminiscent of her childhood than those events.
But she was still lonely. She hadn't stayed in contact with any of her college friends and everyone in this little town seemed too busy to care. Sarah had been fine over the summer when she spent all her time preparing for the school year, locked away in her little house or on the local college campus, but once the semester started she felt a great shift. She did her best to stay busy with teaching, to ignore the ache in her chest.
In late November was when the ache finally sawed through the bars of her always crumbling resolution to stay sane, and in a desperate bid to fill her life with something more than grading papers and writing midterms and finals she began speaking to her old toys again. As she held a Firey in her hands and paced the length of the living room she spoke to it. "Why is it a game to take off your head?" But there was silence. In exasperation she threw her head back, shoulders sagging, and thought she glimpsed pale brown-white-blond feathers moving in the mirror over the fireplace. But she hadn't seen it. It was straining to let herself act insane again. She tried for a week to coax them back to life, Hoggle, Ludo, Sir Didymus- even naming them felt simply silly-but gave up quickly. Not for the first time she told herself that all of that had to have been only a dream and the workings of an over-active imagination, an imagination now trained to work in certain paths and in certain ways. She should not let herself believe otherwise ever again. She had other outlets, her writing, her art.
Even still, she would sometimes glance at the mirror over the fireplace. Perhaps she would see them there. Perhaps one morning she would wake up and the dew on the lawn would be mixed with glitter.
Finals week was a fast blur of quiet tests and pleading students. Sarah remembered the sigh of relief she gave as she shut her front door behind her, letting her purse slide off her shoulder and onto the ground. Finally, respite at last. Winter break was painting and writing and sleeping in long and staying up longer and- dull. Lonely. Horrible. With nothing to do Sarah spent three days in bed, sleeping and hoping her phone would ring, before she finally got restless and put herself to cleaning her little house. Her living quarters had always been spotless and organized, thanks in part to a case of OCD that manifested after that incident. All of her possessions were always neat and tidy, in order. She never had to search for a thing. But she spent December reorganizing everything, condensing things until finally, after much labor and the sacrifice of what had once been her office, she had one bare room. She covered the aged hardwood with a canvas tarp and purchased an old couch from the local Good Will to put under the window. Then she filled the rest of the room with easels and blank canvases and tubes of paint.
In January, after the cleaning, after a Christmas spent with her father and step-mother and Toby, she started painting. This, she thought with elation, hope, this is what I have been missing. The hole that could not be filled with wasted time or family or friends or lectures or grading, could be filled with painting. She had always loved painting and sketching and other forms of art- anything that got her hands dirty- but she was very, very good at writing and so had majored in both when she went to university.
As Sarah painted she found herself the subject of many of the paintings, looking either frightened or full of wonder, many times surrounded by darkness and reaching hands. She didn't plan the paintings, they simply came. In one she was at the top of a long staircase. In another she cradled a young Toby in her arms. And in one that she worked on until the sun rose she killed the owl. For the day after she was filled with relief, relief that slowly drained away until she felt she was going to break. She took that canvas an had it face the wall before she went and curled up in bed.
She was crazy. She was schizophrenic. She had to be schizophrenic. It had all been nothing. Her friends. That place. Him.
Yes. It was far easier to believe one's self insane than to believe in magic.
By the end of her painting spree the run down couch she had purchased was covered in dried paint. Sarah would often collapse into it and from underneath bring out her sketchbook. She would turn to the page she had worked on that first night that she was home from University, puzzling over it not for the first time. It wasn't rare for her doodling to turn into images of herself and that place that she had imagined, but that was the first time words had accompanied an image. She had come to the conclusion a few months ago that it was just a wishfulness for homecoming, a homecoming that didn't really happen. But the answer didn't fit right. The words felt too used, too lyrical. Part of a song that she had heard, perhaps?
A song? Yes. That one with Skylar Grey. How did the chorus go?
"I'm coming home, I'm coming home... Tell the World I'm coming home. Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday... I know my kingdom awaits and they've forgiven my mistakes-"
Her words cut off with a quiet gasp. Stiffly, Sarah stood up and walked from the room, slamming the door behind her. There would be no talk of kingdoms. Not in her house. Not in her mind.