#ch: steve crain
Text
we could’ve made worse mistakes ( you might imagine we did )
Series: leigh crain has powers au
Summary: Steven has ideas about the future. Children factor into it. They do. Truly.
He just didn't think it'd be this early on in his life.
Warnings: mental health issues, suicide, implied child abuse/neglect, death, one ( 1 ) use of the C slur, ableism, menstruation mention, mention of skipped meals & weight talk in the beginning
Other notes: for the discord chat (especially charlie bc ur ocs are Canon Now to me) and also myself because i have headcanons for Leigh; might rewrite the reveal-to-Shirley scene because she does seem wildly... not into it, idk
Two months have passed since they’d first slept together, two months since and she’s not seen blood. It might not mean anything, just stress over this semester’s workload, and cranky from skipping meals from time to time (not often! maybe she should snack more, at least, because she and Steve and Shirley have a little rota system of sorts so that could work out, right?), and... it doesn/t mean she’s pregnant, necessarily. They’d been careful -- birth control, protection, the works. Maybe it’s just her body being a little wonky even though she’s not underweight (not severely enough, or at all, not really), and she doesn’t feel stressed. Better than being at home. “Home”. An aunt and uncle and cousin do not make a home.
Leigh checks the test again. Checks the box to make sure she’s reading it correctly. Beside her, Steve looks them over as well, and her stomach clenches when he hisses through his teeth; she pulls her knees up to her chest when his brow wrinkles into a frown. A small noise (fear) climbs out of her mouth when Steve stays silent.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hey.” No judgement in his voice; an arm wraps around her shoulders, pressing them both together even tighter than thigh-to-thigh on the bathroom floor of their shared apartment. “It’s not your fault. It’s not...” She hears the smack of his lips as he struggles to find something comforting to say, something that sounds natural and not just scrambling to keep Leigh as calm as possible. It doesn’t seem possible right now, or even in the future; still too young for children, still too Markey for this new life, still too tied to Victor and lightning and ghosts for a real life. “We’re both in this, together, no matter what happens. If we keep it, or if we do something about it, or if... we give it up.” Pressing a kiss against her temple, stroking her hair, he says, “I don’t think I’d want to give it up if... if we don’t do something about it.”
It, it, it. So sure “it” is not a “them”. Funny how one’s genetics can mess with stuff like that. Twins, nature control, ghosts. She’s surprised there isn’t a spot of necromancy in there, either.
She has to squash it all down and pray her children (more than one, she can feel it like the night when Victor left, the traitorous shitstain) will not be infected.
Leigh doesn’t dare ask Steve. She knows what he’s told her.
It’s been a month since the test proved positive. They haven’t made any more to do something about it (them); they’ve talked about it (them), and safety nets.
“So.”
“... Yeah.”
“We’re keeping it?” He sounds excited about it. Barely, but the undercurrent is there in his voice, the shine in his eyes, the hopeful clasp of his hands around hers. The way his eyes keep flickering to her barely-there bump. He fucking should be, too -- she is.
“Yeah.” She laughs, exhaling long-held breath. “Yeah.”
Shirley is less than impressed when Leigh breaks the news over a later dinner. It starts off as a joke, “Oh I’m eating for two,” when Leigh really means three as she scarfs down a bigger helping of food. Shirley, looking between her now wide-eyed brother, looking as though he’d been caught out and wasn’t really trying to keep it a secret, and Leigh, looking like the cat with the canary and the cream.
“What the fuck?”
Leigh’s cheeky mood dips, sours. “Don’t be like that.”
“No, are you seriously--?”
Steve tries to placate his sister, reaching for her hand. “Shirl--”
“No!” Shirl whips away, hands to herself. It’s a miracle she doesn’t leave the table, calling them both careless idiots. “What’re you thinking? You can’t be having kids now!”
“Shirl.” He tries again, standing his ground; he knows where Shirl’s coming from, he does, because he’d react the same if she was in the same position. “Me and Leigh have talked about it, and we’ve decided to keep it.”
“Have you?” The question's a sharp wheeze. “Have you considered--”
“Yes, Shirl! We’ve talked about how we’re gonna be able to support our kid, with or without our family’s help.”
Leigh’s thankful there’s no mention of her own family, although she’s not sure if Shirl’s caught on yet. She hopes not.
“Oh Jesus, Stevie--” She's pressing the ball of her palms into her eyes, like the picture in front of her might change and this conversation will cease to be real, as though a the thing (the baby-to-be) in Leigh’s belly will simply disappear. “You’re actually serious about this?”
“Yes.” Joint answer. Shirley just shakes her head, but says no more about it.
When summer break rolls around, Leigh’s stomach is rounder (four months into it now) and she’s debating on whether to beg to go with Steve and Shirl (might as well meet her kids’ other aunts and uncle and great-aunt, right?), or whether to suffer under the eyes of her uncle and cousin and the fretting hands of her aunt. At least Cathleen means well. It’s not enough.
The night before leaving, before her ultimate decision, Victor slips into her dreams again. She’s tried so hard to keep him out while wishing he’d stayed and it’s only worked to make them both upset.
“This wouldn't have happened if you hadn’t killed yourself,” she says, more sulky than all the other times she’s told him this same thing. Her beloved brother, her idol, her hero, her sun-in-the-sky, her do-no-wrong posterboy, her motherfucking protector from all things wrong and evil in this world -- made her watch as he killed himself with that triangle of lightning.
Don’t look away, Leigh. Don’t look away. Don’t look away. Eyes on me. Eyes on me. Eyes on me, Leigh.
“I know,” he says, ever-regretful as all the times before. As much as she wants to hurt him (but God, no, not really, no no no), she knows how sorry he is, how much he regrets it. How he regretted it at the time, at the terrifying need to make something stop but having no other option he could see--
He lays beside her in the dewy nighttime grass as the eternal nighttime sky of their shared world rolls overhead, stars speeding past their eyes; the trees circle them widely, like nature’s earthly crown. Victor rolls over to his side, grasping her forearm in his hand. “You can’t go back there. You know that; if you want these kids to see the world, you won't go back to those assholes.” She shouldn’t be surprised that he knows about them since he’s never wholly left since that night, but it still makes her skin crawl. (Why didn’t he do something about it, as she knew he did with so many other things? With the playground bullies? With the teachers? Did he fear her falling into the foster system? What’s to fear now?)
Leigh's throat clogs; everything is thick with tears. “I know.”
“It’ll kill them. It’ll kill you.”
She’s not sure whether if it’ll merely hurt her, or if she’ll join him here. She doesn’t ask for clarification.
Steven, the oldest brother, the most responsible of the Crain siblings, returns home with Shirley and his pregnant girlfriend. His girlfriend of a year and a half, who came home for a couple of weekends over that time, who chimed in on calls home, who is known by name and middle name and surname and age and hobbies and prospective career. Theo doesn’t shake her hand, instead going in for a hug (and if Theo were to be asked, and if she were to answer honestly, she’d confess that she felt that beat of preternatural in Leigh's blood), and Leigh is relieved that she’s got at least three out of six on her side. The twins hug her, too, before they pay attention to their own siblings. Janet is much the same. A home run; six outta six. Not bad, kiddo, not bad.
Later, during a quiet game after dinner, Leigh offers to clean up with Janet, insisting on it despite everyone saying she should rest. C’mon, she's only four months along, give over.
“Have you told your parents you're not going home?” Janet asks. It’s an innocent presumption, but the weight of everything -- of her brother’s death, of her father’s death, of her mother’s unravelled mind, of her remaining family’s pewter-cold regard -- is suddenly crushing her shoulders. She takes a chair out from under the table and slumps down, leaning against the back of it. Her hands are clammy.
“Sweetheart?” Janet's hand curls around her shoulder, and this tenderness, this genuine care that’s freely given to her, shatters that last wall of preservation: she weeps. Collected into Janet’s arms, she weeps harder, howling into her shoulder, snot dribbling freely as she cries aloud how her father is dead and her mother let herself lose her mind because why stay sane for her only daughter and only surviving family? And it was all Victor’s fault that she was stuck with her stupid frail aunt and boar of an uncle and cunting bitch of a cousin and she hated them all and that's why she’s here instead because the babies would die and she would die and it’d be the end of her because all the love she’d had had been swept away when she was only eight years old.
Janet tells her she can stay. She’s home.
The twins, Diane and Michael, are born on a Monday. Twenty-third of October. Janet has promised to look after them along with Theo, Luke, and Nellie. It’s almost too good to be true, but it’s perhaps the one thing that’s worked out for Leigh and Steven so far.
When winter break swings around, Steven proposes to Leigh, down on one knee in their shitty green-carpeted living space, short fibres rough on his knee and shin. They’re both still sleepy from the late night and late rising, and they’ve only talked about this since August, but of course Leigh says yes.
It’s all too good to be a fairy tale.
Two years later, they’re on their honeymoon, and Leigh is positively pregnant again. Nine months later, Robin and Eleanor, “Nora”, are born, and it’s still too good.
Fifteen years later, Nellie’s dead. Steven sees her in his hotel room.
At home, his children see her too.
#mine#my writing#mw: the haunting of hill house#mw: rp related#wc: 1000 – 2000#series: leigh crain has powers au#ch: leigh crain#ch: steve crain#sft#/ it's not a series yet but yeet lmao#/ also only tagging leigh & steve bc it's About Them
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i did not believe in ghosts until i saw my own body
Series: steve is the ghost au
Summary: Silence falls over everything in the House.
Warnings: death, mention of mental illness, ableist language, body horror maybe ( because of the black mold? jic )
Other notes: reposted from my (now archived) rp blog aghostisawish; apologies to my RP partners who read it, and apologies to the Discord chat; title from Topaz Winter’s “battlefield”, from her book poems for the sound of the sky before thunder
Leigh wasn’t answering his calls, always letting them go to voicemail instead, probably deleting them as soon as she heard the first note of Steve’s voice. He understands that. A plethora of wishes, all sprouted and flourished and aged from the same decades-old seed, circle in his head until he’s tired and headachey and heads back to his hotel room.
All he wants to do is sleep all his fuck-ups away. His argument, if it could be called that, with Nell; lying to Leigh; the book; the night Luke and Joey came to his house on a day pass.
And there’s the… illness that’s flaring up. Just a flare-up; it’s not the first time he’s seen his mother, however distorted or silhouetted or hazy or— she was never clear anymore. She’s never been clear since — since when? Since before the House? But no, that was unfair, and it was the mold that did her in. That made her— made her die. Smashed the vanity mirror with the mold he painted over but he didn’t know, did he, he didn’t know and thought it was anything but a genuine threat—
He huffs into his pillow, his head turned to the side with one eye open, watching the red haze of his mother in the corner. Why is she in red? Does the mind put together symbols when nothing makes sense? The Red Room becomes a red mother. Sounds like a load of horseshit: the mind is nonsense and any “meaning” is straw-grabbing.
He needs real sleep, to recharge and be able to think instead of drowning in guilt and dread. Because Leigh will leave him, and it’d be better for her to do that, all the years he’s made her waste with him when he couldn’t give what they both wanted. Just as well, because this is a sign of the future and the future will repeat or rhyme with the past and he can’t put that on his kids, his never-to-be-kids. Even if he’d had the chance, even if he tried to avoid repetition he would’ve done it anyway.
Steve falls asleep against his own body’s alarm: his red mother is coming closer.
Spluttering awake at midnight, Steve sees that the lights are off like someone had flicked the switch for him. He knew they were on when he’d collapsed on the bed but now they weren’t so he must’ve, at some point during the evening, gotten up and done that himself, or one of the cleaning staff saw him and turned the light out. Do they do that? Did he turn it off? Was he so out of it that he doesn’t remember? Probably, yes, he’s often on autopilot these days. These days?
There’s a dip in the bed so real he forgets his scepticism. A hand in his hair and a little hum of a tune he can’t quite remember. Well-kept nails scraping just so against his scalp that makes his skin turn to goosebumps.
When he dares to turn, he doesn’t need the light when the moonlight from out his hotel window shines in just so and illuminates the black mold that’s riddled his mother’s face.
“Stevie, my love,”
his mother says, her mouth moving abnormally like her jaw is fractured, as she tightens her grip on his hair like a vice,
“come home.”
A cry and wrenching free and he tumbles out of bed, smacking his head against the bedside table, landing hard on bristly blue-green carpet.
The lights are on now. There are tears in Stevie’s eyes and he can’t tell if it’s from grief or fear or dread or the pain of all-too-real fingers that had threatened to rip his scalp off if he did not come home.
He’s not going to die. That’s not his plan, no, he just needs to see the House and understand. Confronting the past and the House, for it is only a house, just a building of neat bricks and walls, would do him some good. Not as much good as, say, seeing a doctor and seeking treatment, but it’ll do for now until he does.
But what is there to understand? Unsure of his own reasoning but gunning for it anyway.
The chain is easy to do away with and he should probably find a proper way of keeping this place closed ( because he’s not calling Dad to do it, no way — all the way in fucking Florida? no ). The House, once he’s out of the car, doesn’t look any different since that last night, when Dad had said that’s not your mother. If Dad saw him now, would he say that’s not my son? No relatives if you’re fucking crazy— if you’re ill.
What do you need to see, Stevie?
Like the lights, he doesn’t remember the short trek over the overgrowth of the garden to the door, or opening it up ( no locks on that, either ), just autopiloted movement and yeah, he should see a doctor at some point even if autopilot mode is normal for normal people. Just nothing but the dark House and it’s shadows.
Then there’s a whisper of his name — Stevie, my love, come home — and he turns and then he turns again and there’s light. The foyer is lit like it used to be before bedtime and it shouldn’t be because the electricity was cut off ( was it? Dad wouldn’t waste that kind of money on this place ) but it’s all on anyway.
More whispering, conspiratorial and familiar and young, and he follows the sounds, sticking to the walls while his heart thunders against his ribcage, while his mind screams to run anywhere but here, anywhere but here, anywhere but here, Stevie, what were you thinking! But he has to see it through. He has to see it through.
They’re all at the dinner table, crowded round, all casual and cosy and comfortable that it makes Steve’s heart ache. Leigh, his beautiful, wonderful wife sees him first and beams at him like she hasn’t done since sometime before the truth spilled out of him. She’s the first to collect him in her arms, and he’s missed her so much, been wanting to fix this rift he’d put between them and made a chasm, so he wraps around her just the same, his breath coming in short staccato gasps as she soothes him. God, but he doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve it when his siblings and his dad gather around him, enveloping him in warmth he doesn’t deserve.
It’s not real! It’s not real! It’s not REAL!
But they’re so warm. And they’re telling him they understand – about the book, about the money, about his struggling with distinguishing reality from a wish. This last — this last thing they tell him, that Nellie tells him, breaks him, breath becoming spluttered cries as his legs threaten to give out beneath him. Because he has been fearing the worst, that his mind was going ( and it must be, because he’s here and they shouldn’t be and it doesn’t make any sense— ), and he’d— he’d wanted it fixed, not to burden his family but hearing it being acknowledged, especially by his own younger siblings who had suffered more than him—
“It’s not a competition, Stevie, you know that,” Nellie says.
—it’s not something he wants to admit to wanting.
“We love you, Steven. We never stopped loving you.”
“We’re taking the party upstairs,” Shirley says, nudging him in the side like when she used to when they were in college. Kevin is already herding the kids up the shaky-looking metal steps of the spiral steps, followed by Luke and Theo and Dad and Leigh. Nell is hanging back with Arthur, waiting to see if Steve will follow them up. He’s wary, of course he’s wary, look at the steps—
“OK,” he says, trusting them when he shouldn’t. He follows them — Shirley, Arthur, Nellie, him.
His phone rings at the top step, showing the time to be three minutes past midnight. Wow, that’s past the kids’ bedtime. The contact’s name is Nell. He blinks, rubs his eyes, because that can’t be right ( but it is ), because Nellie’s just in front of him — except they’ve all disappeared, and what was lit by wall lights is now dark and dusty and cold. His breath shudders as he answers the phone: “Nellie?”
“Steve—” She sounds just as out of breath.
“Nellie, is that you? Where are you?” He grips the railing, keeping his eye on the archway leading into the deeper dark, fearing what he knew was coming.
“It—yes, I’m at home—? Steve, I know— I know it’s late—”
“I love you Nellie, you know that?” He has to let her know, and he only looks to the railing for a second, glancing to gauge how far a way from the stair case he is now, only a second—
“Steve—” Nell tries to get a word in edgeways just as Mom appears in front of him, her hand gently gripping his jaw to make him look at her, mold and milky eyes and all. If Nellie says anything else, he doesn’t hear it, only his mother’s words.
“Welcome home, my love.”
He’s no longer gripping the railing, or his phone: the phone drops to the floor of the balcony, clattering, clattering to the floor below, shattering and distorting the connection the House allows for this moment, and his mother pushes him backwards. The last thing he hears is the fractured and frantic, “Steve! Steve are you there—?” from the shattered phone as his head hits the floor below.
Silence falls over everything in the House.
#mine#my writing#mw: the haunting of hill house#mw: rp related#wc: 1000 – 2000#series: steve is the ghost au#ch: steve crain#ch: olivia crain#ch: nell crain#ch: leigh crain#sft#/ it's not a series yet but yeet lmao#/ bit more liberal with the character tags bc i do what i want
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