⊰ neverparted ⊱
It wasn’t a matter of whether she FEARED him or not. Frightening a young woman was not his intent, but his sister’s. But Lucille had long retreated into the bowels of the house, snapping only when someone interrupted her personal space and privacy. A few incidents HAD happened where workers were chased off by a screeching spectre, but lately the new owners of Allerdale Hall seemed to be there only a few days each year.
Now, however, it seemed that they were staying longer, which meant that the chances of them waking Lucille were higher. There was only so much that he could do to keep her from harming others, but he seemed to have done an effective job of frightening the girl on his own. It just so happened that the room she was in was his OLD room, which was why he was often there, unseen. But then she’d called out into the darkness, and from the way she spoke, it seemed like he was talking to him.
❝ You should not be, my lady. ❞
His tone came from the shadows in the far corner, and he slowly materialized, stepping into the moonlight. Thomas knew that he looked terrible, with his pale pallor and sunken eyes. Not something anyone should see in the dead of the night. He turned his gaze from her then, though his finger gestured to the flower she held between her fingers. So she’d seen it.
❝ Not of me, at least. ❞
Bran believed in ghost stories; not his elder sister, who ever preferred lace-edged tales of princess and midnight kisses, the glittering balls that always ended in happily ever after. Yet here in Allendale she had no brother, no fairy tale dreams, no memory of bedtime stories shared by a mother who also sometimes longed for the warm evenings and muffled laughter of her youth. Here Sansa must exercise the utmost caution; indeed, Baelish had at last claimed his gifted parcel in no small part thanks to its isolation. Though such insulating distance hindered certain business ventures of his, it guaranteed that she might stay out of sight, tended to only by Petyr and a small cadre of trusted staff who would stay on beyond unpacking.
He had graciously given her the finest room, an honor greeted with more dubiety when Sansa took in pitted floorboards, peeling wallpaper, and grime-coated windows which faced away from the long front drive. Rugs would cover ancient wood planks, furniture and hangings shipped specially from London a brightening influence as well once they arrived, yet even then she doubted the room would ever be rid of its…otherness. And now the rose, cradled lightly in her palm as though made of smoke, seemed to warn that this room, this house, would never fully belong to man or girl.
“Gah— !”
Breaking off a cry, she fumbled with the thorn-studded stem; for a moment it wobbled precariously, before Sansa clutched ghostly offering with a desperate grip. Fleeting pain stung along her hand, crimson dots welling where verdant barbs met flesh. Impossible. The long journey, the isolation, the moldering sense of abandonment which sank into her bones alongside a damp chill…these things had made her hear a voice which could not speak, see a man who could not exist.
Until he spoke again. “And— and was it you, then? Who left this? Or…someone else?”