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[failure]

Hello, I'm stuck in an empty office w/ no work for the next six hours so I'm bringing back the old school Drabble meme.

1. Tag in
2. Leave prompts
3. Write

Comments

Els & Cam - MTV cribs

[failure]

It was a bit like a Geiger counter. The noise getting louder as it got closer to some unlucky person. "Cam. Cam. Cam? Cam."

Cam ducked his head behind his laptop and turned up his headphones until he could no longer hear the incessant noise of, "Cam. Cam? Cam! Cam, Cam; Cam: Cam- Cam. Cam," from outside the ship's lounge. It was too late for him though; before long a mop of curls with a person attached had stuck its head round the door. "-Cam. Cam. Hi Cam."

"Hi Elsa," Cam removed his headphones, pretended he hadn't heard her previous attempts to find him via echolocation.

"Captain landed earlier," she said, continuing to lean round the doorway, holding onto it for balance.

"Yes, he made an announcement. Earth, right?" Cam was doubtful it was 'his' Earth. He'd been hoping to stay aboard until Captain gave away what horrible monsters he'd decided to spice up their lives with.

"My Earth," Elsa said.

"Are you going to visit your family?"

"Would you like to come see something from my childhood? It's this old house."

"Old house?"

"Ha. Yeah," Elsa finally stepped into the room. "I haven't seen it since I was a kid. I would like to, again."

"I'm pretty busy," Cam looked at his laptop. It was open to an empty desktop. "Maybe later."

"If you want," she shrugged. "But my immortal danger-magnet great-grandma just told me she's going to go find her werewolf best buddy and then they're coming back to make you help them kill the internet. Ha ha ha."

Cam pressed his hands to his face. Elsa looked mildly triumphant. He hadn't been able to tell if she just wanted someone to come out with her or was trying to avoid Mari bringing her second-hand embarrassment; her laugh sounded a bit like someone else's mild hyperventilation. "Fine," he said. "...But don't adopt any dinosaurs while we're out."

"For a man who's played just about every video game under the sun, you're awfully anti-adventure."

•••••
Captain beamed them down. It was a field, now grown over. A small one, though. A little farm house. it looked beautiful until they got close. It was only close up that a person could see how ramshackle it was, where it was falling apart. "It's been years since I was here," Elsa said. "I can't even remember the last time."

Cameron didn't say anything in reply to that, too busy looking at the house doubtfully. "Will it stay standing if we go inside?"

"I certainly hope so," Elsa said mildly. She ducked in through the door which lay open, swinging on its hinges. When it became clear she wouldn't come out soon, he followed her in.

The halls were dank and smelled of damp, of urine slightly. Elsa pushed debris from someone's camping trip into what had been the fireplace. "Local kids think this place is haunted," she explained. "They come here a lot, dare each other to spend the night."

Cameron looked around. "Ghosts are real in your world, aren't they?"

Elsa looked around the room as though one might appear and give him an answer. But the house was silent. She shrugged. "Apparently there was some kind of axe-maniac. Just got in and went mad." She did an impression of someone chopping.

She pointed at a corner. "The dad and the little boy died here."

"How many were there?"

"Four," Elsa popped her head into what had been the kitchen; looking for something that wasn't there. She walked up the stairs. "Mother, father, brother, baby."

Cam followed her up. More rooms up here. They came across a nursery with satanic symbols drawn on the wall. She rubbed them with her sleeve until they smeared into unrecognisability. There were a lot of them. Kids playing pranks. Had they forgotten that this was once a home? Cam wondered. Perhaps they didn't want to acknowledge that this had once been a home. That a family had been here. The horrific pain of random chance, the absurdity of the universe was something people wanted to shield themselves from. Hence the demonic symbols, he guessed. It was easier to make a joke of this, some stupid dare involving the devil and a forgettable scare, than to allow yourself to admit that something so awful and terrible had happened to someone, that another human being had caused it, that it was random and thus had a chance, however small, however you tried to protect yourself, of happening to you. Seeing how hard Elsa was working, he helped too, rubbing away marker pen with his sleeve.

They moved through the rooms as silent as phantoms, but nothing revealed itself to them. In the smallest room, Elsa pointed to a decaying crib in the corner. "That's where the mother died. Apparently, she threw herself over the cot and the baby. The mad axe man must have thought he'd killed the kid too, but the baby was completely untouched."

"Lucky," Cam said, looking about the tiny box room with its white walls.

"Yeah," Elsa said. "The police found the baby underneath the mother's body. Sleeping away. Covered in blood. Must have looked dead enough to an axe murderer, I guess. Ha ha ha."

"Wow," Cam said, uncertain of what his response should be. "Like Harry Potter," he said, and wanted to kick himself. Fuck his life.

"Yeah," said Elsa thoughtfully. "They wouldn't remember it, though. Not like when the dementors give Harry flashbacks."

"You guys had Harry Potter here, too?"

"Are you joking? I was Harry five Halloweens running! Never trick or treated but...it's the fake tattoo and stick wand that counts, right?"

"I don't remember trick or treating either," Cam said.

"I didn't think you'd be the trick or treat type," she said and beamed at him for a second before looking back at the floor. 'That is why I want to be your friend,' she didn't say out loud, but she awkwardly touched his arm before she left the room. He wasn't the tallest person he knew, but she only came up to his chest. She had very small hands, even for a girl.

There were few other rooms to the haunted house. Elsa scrubbed half heartedly at some graffiti in the master bedroom; Cam kicked the dirt. "No ghosts," she said, after a bit.

"Were you hoping for ghosts?"

"Yeah. Ha ha," she smiled faintly, looked around the abandoned house and stuck her hands into her sweater pockets. "That's all I really wanted to see. I was curious."

"To see if ghosts exist?"

Elsa seemed deep in thought. After a moment, she looked away. "Even if something's an empirical reality, even if it's a definite, if you don't see it, if you've never seen it, the idea of it actually existing becomes fuzzy in your mind. You doubt it did exist. Don't you?"

"Sometimes."

"I just wanted to confirm," she said and smiled faintly at him again. "The reality of ghosts. That's all I wanted to confirm."

They walked out together into the light. They didn't talk about ghosts again.

Re: Els & Cam - MTV cribs

[dazzling]

oh noooooo this is so lovely. i really like the melancholy, forlorn atmosphere of it.

elsa is a baby. >: my heart for her and her vandalized and abandoned house.