ravenvsfox:

(I am sorry…… that this took me a year……. forgive me)

Allison’s family home, it turns out, is dressed for a gala but graver than a funeral. Everywhere there are cascading chandeliers, grim looking busts, and freshly cut flowers bordering huge open spaces like the frames on minimalist paintings. The ornate, vaulted ceilings remind Neil of the way Allison described her childhood — too perfect not to reach for, too far away to touch.

He can feel the foxes fanned out behind him, laughing and humming to fill the space, steering each other towards ornate birdcages and moustachioed portraits. Allison walks through the centre of the freckled marble, looking bored and regal. It’s easy to tell that she’s uncomfortable from the way her shoulders are so far back that the blades look skewered together. 

Neil watches her bob towards the stairs and double suddenly back, heels deafening on the tile. She plucks gum from her mouth and wedges it on the underside of the foyer table.

“Hope it’s mummified by the time they get back,” she sniffs, and keeps walking. Neil looks to Andrew and finds his eyes following Allison as well, dark with thought.

It’s the sticky end of summer, and Allison’s parents are away on an island so remote that it doesn’t have a name. They spend their time there getting piss drunk and pretending they don’t have a daughter, from what Neil understands.

It was Renee who suggested that they pay the Reynolds mansion a visit as some sort of therapeutic release, Nicky who encouraged outright vandalism, and Dan who made it into a team retreat.

It hadn’t been hard for nine athletes to hop the gate, cancel the cleaning staff for the week, and break the artisanal handles right off the front door. It had even been thrilling in a farfetched kind of way, the way crime for fun instead of survival made the consequences look as improbable as bad dreams. 

Neil likes the way the foxes shoe-prints look on the white flooring, the way they jostle smiles out of Allison the longer they walk through her old prison block.

“So, like, are their dungeons in this joint?” Matt asks, watching his own hand gliding up the golden bannister, his mouth quirked like he can’t believe it.

“Nah,” Dan says from a little further up the stairs, “They had to conserve space for the labyrinth.”

“There’s a home theatre in the basement,” Allison says airily. Then, thoughtful, “but who knows what’s under that.”

“If we watched Labyrinth in your swanky theatre it would almost be the same,” Matt jokes.

“You’re so dumb,” Dan laughs, pushing him so he falls one stair back. They get to a landing with a little unnecessary standing fountain and everyone shuffles around it, exchanging snapped, bewildered looks.

“Don’t you ever get lost in this place?” Nicky asks. He’s been craning his neck so constantly since they arrived that he’s been almost quiet.

“No,” Allison replies flatly, “but congratulations for being the lucky one thousandth person to ask me that.” They’re in a slightly less decorated area of the house now, with heavy-looking polished doors leading down spidering hallways. “Pick a wing.”

“A wing?” Aaron asks disbelievingly.

“Left,” Neil says, so they don’t stall out discussing it. He keeps looking back at Andrew to make sure he’s still there.

“West,” Allison corrects, and pulls back a tapestry on the left with a narrow staircase beyond it.

“What the fuck,” Dan breathes. “You’re richer than God.”

Allison shrugs. “Having no morals has paid off pretty well for the Reynolds, historically.”

They all trudge up another set of stairs and find an entire lounge set into a deep, windowless room at the top. Kevin makes a muffled noise at the sight of the bar, and Dan drapes herself dramatically into the chaise lounge that’s rubbing shoulders with overstuffed armchairs. 

There’s a pool table, smokey amber light, pockmarked hardwood, and a sleek grand piano, propped open at the far side of the room. Neil’s hands creak, protesting under tight scars when he balls them into fists.

Andrew floats along the side of his vision and so he stops looking at the gleam of the pedals, feeling murky and caught like he’s pretending to be sober.

“Please drink,” Allison says, on cue. “If we don’t cost them at least a grand I’ll be fucking pissed.”

Kevin hops over the bar and Aaron follows him, lolling over the counter. Renee perches at the piano to teasing hoots from the upperclassmen. She puts her right hand to the keys and walks her fingers up, a simple melody from some standard piece. It’s something in a bland major key, and it has that flavour that hymns have — hard to mess up, clean and forgettable.

“Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd,” Andrew murmurs. What pleases me is above all the lively hunt. It takes Neil a scared gap of a second to realize that he’s quoting the piece she’s playing.

“I fucking love this place,” Matt says. “Neil, my boy, tell me you’re drinking with us.”

Renee smiles over at the piano, messing up, and plays a few smashed keys like she’s admitting defeat. Allison leans on an ugly chord, all flats, to make Renee laugh.

Neil thinks of his mother arranging his hands over the yellowing keys of the piano and leaving him there, stranded at a stranger’s house on a bench that groaned when he breathed. The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks it might have been a kind of safe-house; he was never there at the same time, and he was always distracted with books and music and TV.

Nathan would start pounding at the walls like there was something inside them he wanted to wake up, and Mary would send him to Connie’s. She’d tell him he had to learn something for when she came for him or she’d leave him there for good.

“Neil.” It’s Andrew’s voice, and he knows that he must look as frozen solid as he feels.

“Yeah, I’ll drink,” he pronounces slowly. He hates that old panic can still walk up to him and put its hands around his throat, all the blood in his head rushing into the past. He hates that this is the crime scene of Allison’s tragedy and he still can’t help making it about himself. He’s always bursting into other peoples nightmares, drowning out their whimpers with his shouts. 

It’s been so long since he’s thought about the way music felt like another language that he learned and owned, same as French or German or exy.

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