A Night In [Aaron|Sara]

[MP]

When the agent nudged open the door, his first glance was for the blind spots, the open doorways, a habitual scan of the hall. Only when the lighting and the quiet of the house satisfied him did he toe off his shoes. Aaron shifted the takeout bag in his arms, shoulders relaxing. Still, he left his coat on as he stepped inside. 

"I'm back."

He glanced around for Sara - the spot by the window she frequented as a cat, or the swish of her tail past the kitchen door. The familiar sound of her footsteps reassured him as he started setting out the table. His eyes flickered to the window, refocusing on some peripheral movement. Nothing out of place. At least, no more so than usual. 

"Did you pick one out?" 

[tsukikoko]

The sheer relief Sara felt, at the sound of Aaron's voice when he returned home, was uncannily similar to the span of time during the aftermath of her attack by that wendigo and vampire. A sobering reminder of the current state of things.

Still, she tried not to let the feelings linger, or weigh on her too much; she and Aaron were having a rare (of late) and much needed evening to themselves, so she had no intention of spoiling it with negativity!

Helping to bolster her mood was the film she'd chosen; one of the rare cases of a physical copy in her selection that she hadn't yet watched. She wasn't even sure why, but was glad of it, given the circumstances, so that she could have genuine first reactions alongside her fiancé.

The first thing to appear through the doorway, held by familiar pale hand and waggling at Aaron to get his attention, was the film in question. A mostly black DVD case, with a pale, greenish face staring from one side of the box, marked the film quite neatly as a horror. The title 'The Grudge' was likely also a giveaway.

Sara herself stepped through soon after, walking up beside Aaron and carefully slipping an arm around his back when she wasn't at risk of disrupting his table setting. A soft kiss to his cheek soon followed - her most common greeting when he returned home.
"What d'ya reckon, luv? Interested in some cathartic spooks, like?"

[MP]

Aaron turned at the sound of Sara’s approach. The brush of her lips came from the other direction, startling his near eye closed and teasing a smile from his lips. She was already dancing past, propelled by her usual energy. He still didn’t know how she did it.

“Spooks are fine.”

He glanced dutifully at the box. Excessive darkness, a wide-eyed stare, an extreme close up of the monster - slasher? Ghost? He wasn’t sure - it practically beat you over the head with the fear. Based on his experience, it would probably be heavy-handed, but ultimately fine.

“Let me get changed. Then I’ll be good to go.”

Aaron waved her toward the food, which had already started to cool.

“Go ahead and eat.”

[tsukikoko]

Sara watched Aaron walk away, a familiar twinkle in her eye hinting at her temptation to follow after him. But, for the sake of the food he'd gone to the effort of collecting, she instead did as she was bid and sat down at the table.

Didn't stop her checking him out as he walked away, though.

As she forked the first few mouthfuls of her chicken dish into her mouth, the shifter casually turned over the film to once more read the blurb on the back. She was currently weighing up whether it would be a legitimately unnerving experience, or a cheap, mediocre series of jumpscares. Asian horror was usually on the better side, but this film looking to be an American interpretation instead, so it could go either way.

Not that she minded, she'd be clinging to Aaron before long either way. Just to be close to him.

[MP]

It wasn't long before the sound of Aaron's footsteps came down the hall. Now in casual clothing - a faded t-shirt and sweat pants that would have struck most as uncharacteristic of the strict agent - Aaron scooped up the case to set up the movie. Why Sara preferred a collection of hard copies, he never knew. But it wouldn't make a difference to the movie either way.

"You said you haven't seen this one?"

He brought the remote back with him, placing it by Sara's hand as he settled down beside her. When it came to control of the remote, he preferred to let her handle things. Aaron began to eat, mechanically and at a rapid rate, as if he were still tied to his narrow lunch shift.

[tsukikoko]

The shifter shook her head as she dutifully held her hand out to receive the remote, finishing off her latest mouthful of food before she verbally responded.
"Nah luv, strangest thing, like. Every time I thought tah meself I should, somethin' would come up tah distract us, like."
She chuckled, then busied herself with setting up the film in between further bites of food. Her pace wasn't on par with Aaron's, so he soon caught her up.

"Why aye man, just means we're both gannin' te 'ave legitimate reactions, like. Should be reet canny."

As the film began to start, Sara paused it, indicating the food still left.
"Want tah wait till we're done, just in case, like?"
As she said this, the shifter altered her position until her tail was angled, relatively safely, away from the two of them. There'd been some... experiences with the rogue limb and horror films in the past. While Aaron had become rather proficient in wrangling her tail, pinning it down or otherwise mitigating the damage, it still always posed a furniture and personal health risk.

[MP]

Aaron paused, looking down at his plate. By now, it was nearly scraped clean. But he nodded and spooned up the last few bites. Still chewing, he gathered his plate and the empty containers up in one arm and carried it all to the kitchen.

Between the clink of dishes and the hiss of the running sink, he leaned out occasionally - discreetly, trying not to rush Sara’s dinner - to check for and receive any incoming dishes.

Get the chores out of the way; keep their evening hassle free. To anyone else, it might have looked like the agent’s usual inability to unwind. But when dinner was done and the table was clear and wiped clean, Aaron settled on the couch, feet firmly planted, hands folded across his lap. Relaxed.

“Okay,” he said.

[tsukikoko]

Despite her initial headstart, Sara was slower to finish than her partner - partially due to her propensity for distraction and multitasking. She'd ended up adjusting a few settings on the screen, converting the colour balance and other such settings to best suit a movie night.

One of the times Aaron leaned out from washing dishes, however, he was met by a familiar redhead with her dishes in hand, a brief kiss on the lips and a soft thanks for cleaning up. Where he saw to tidying, she busied herself with gathering drinks and a couple of snacks to stash by the side of the sofa, just in case they wanted anything during the film.

Once he had settled, the shifter nestled herself beside him, one hand laid across Aaron's forearm and her body angled towards his as the movie began to play. Though it didn't take long before she was sitting up straighter, a look of slight befuddlement on her face as the character on screen seemed... precariously positioned on a balcony. His expression made Sara's hairs raise with instinctive unease and in her head she already wondered why the woman in the bed near him wasn't similarly perturbed. He did not seem okay. But they were only thirty seconds in, was the film going to throw something this quickly?

"Eee now... Ya don't reckon 'e's-"
Even as the words started to leave her mouth, the character on screen neatly tipped himself over the edge and sent himself plummeting to the street below, landing in a splayed and very clearly dead heap. Sara blinked, her eyes widening slightly.
"Oh 'eck." She cast a glance Aaron's way. Turned her head towards him with her eyebrows raised. "Off tah a quick start, apparently, like."

[MP]

Aaron nodded, though his expression held more puzzled reservation than anything. Yes, it was abrupt, but the behavior wasn't at all accurate to the way infectious curses behaved. And it didn't scream horror to him.

The horror, he assumed, would have something to do with water and hair, if the opening credits were anything to go by. The young biker - caregiver - he corrected himself as she entered the house and crouched down beside an older woman, would probably encounter it soon.

"I guess she's next," he said.

Maybe this was the place the opening text had mentioned. The "place of death." But if that were true, the current resident would most likely have been killed already. More likely, he thought, the caregiver would be the next to unexpectedly suicide. He hoped this movie wouldn't be one of the kinds to rely on gory shock value. Those had never felt enjoyable.

[tsukikoko]

"Ya reckon?" Sara questioned in response, watching the young woman on screen. "Reet quick turnaround o' characters if she is, like."

It wasn't long, though, before the shifter found herself silently agreeing with Aaron's assessment - when said character wandering into a room of seemingly no plot relevance, until strange noises began sounding from above her. The camera followed, highlighting it as movement from one side to the other.

Sara tensed, feeling a high pitched note building in the back of her throat.

Soon the girl was opening a sliding cupboard. Then, more horrifyingly, some kind of hatch in the ceiling, the darkness beyond which she thought would be a good idea to illuminate with nothing more than a lighter. Sara felt her head shaking in the disbelief she always felt at these movie characters. It never seemed to get easier to experience.
"Oh, fuck me, I wouldn't." The shifter murmured, her eyes glued to the screen despite herself. "Git a better light at le-"

Her words cut off as the girl on screen peered around the loft space and Sara realised, half-hidden in the gloom behind her, was something.

The soft sound of fear and something like manically nervous laughter at the clear threat, turned into a yelp of shock as the ghoulish thing was illuminated, lunged and dragged the woman up into the loft space. Sara's tail spasmed and one hand flinched to grab Aaron's sleeve.

Then all too soon they were with yet more characters, with an atmosphere and emotional change so sudden one could risk whiplash in the wake of it.

Sara turned her widened green eyes towards her fiancé,
"Eeee man. Ya were reet."

[MP]

Aaron watched quietly as the girl found the closet, but as the camera angled up toward the ceiling hatch, his muscles had gradually gone tense. The groan of wood. The creaking moving overhead. The slow pan to the closet. He nodded agreement with Sara. Peeking headfirst into dark spaces - never a good move. This girl was ghost fodder for sure.

Even that certainty wasn't enough to mute the surge of adrenaline when the grey face first appeared over the girl's shoulder. Aaron's eyes widened slightly as he saw it, but his expression remained otherwise fixed. He put a hand over Sara's tail automatically, half weighting, half stroking the scales.

"Guess so," he said.

As a new couple was introduced, he wondered if they'd last any longer than the first two characters. A healthy relationship, an established job, and longer than average screen time. Chances were good, and now the movie seemed to be easing back on the tension. Watching the bustling city and sunlit streets, the tension likewise drained out of Aaron's frame.

"Do they live?" he asked Sara, eyes still on the screen.

His guess still leaned toward 'unlikely.' The girl, Karen, turned out to be a caregiver. Within moments, she'd received a case file to cover for Yoko, the previous girl. The same house. The same elderly woman - Emma, he read from the file.

How long had Emma been alone, he wondered, now that Yoko was dead? Where was the daughter they'd referenced to take care of her? The thought of the older woman, lost in her head and alone in the house, sent an unhappy pang through his chest. He thought from the silent yard and the chaotic interior that she must be dead already.

It was a relief when the thump of hands against glass interrupted Karen's slow walk through the house. Aaron could see from the color that they were living hands. Emma seemed to be in a catatonic state - whether from her existing condition or the ghost's doing, he couldn't tell.

Aaron made a faint sound - an almost breath that fell short without ever making it to words. It was often a sign of something wistful or troubling on his mind. It was the state of the house, maybe. Or Emma's distant, unhappy stare.

But the movie soon turned away from the sobering scene, and Aaron's thoughts with it. Karen ascended the same stairs as Yoko had before her. She came to the same room with the same closet, now covered with desperately haphazard strips of tape. Aaron's eyebrows raised as the thumping and scratching within changed to soft yowling.

"A cat?" he murmured to Sara.

It seemed like an odd feature to add to a ghost. Or maybe this was another fake scare - a stray cat that had gotten in. Something to let them down and lower their guard for the real ghost to appear.

[tsukikoko]

Sara caught the sound, even over the movie scenes. She didn't say anything, but reached over and gently laid her hand atop his; gave a gentle squeeze of his fingers, understanding without being intrusive.

Then the scene moved on and the shifter withdrew her hand to a little further up the Agent's arm. Ready to grab his sleeve when the next scare came.

Given the banging, animal yowling and the return of the cupboard Yoko had died in, Sara rather thought said scare was just on the horizon.

"I 'ope it ain't abowt tah kill the cat, like," she murmured back to Aaron. Animals usually had a better sense for these things and with the sounds this one was making, it rather seemed something bad was about to happen. But how and why was it inside the now taped-up cupboard? Karen, it seemed, intended to find out, given how she was ripping away the tape. While normally Sara would bemoan a character's actions in these films, in this instance, she couldn't blame the other woman. If she thought an animal was trapped, the redhead would behave much the same.

The cupboard door crept open for the second time in the film, Karen peering inside much as the girl Yoko had done previously. Only, this time, a book lay inside. Sara was so momentarily perplexed and intrigued by said book, but with her body coiled so tight in preparation of the danger that could lurk within that cupboard, when the next cat yowl came she near leapt clean out of her skin.

A short, sharp cry, a flinch and a half-aborted attempt to press herself into Aaron later, she was faced with a completely baffling scene of child and angry-sounding cat curled up in the cupboard.

"What the blinkin' 'ell is 'e doin' in there?" She asked aloud. Unlike the thing in the loft, this child certainly looked alive; were they hiding? Who had locked them inside?

The shifter found herself with many questions, no answers and a heart currently trying to calm itself down after slamming against her ribs.

[MP]

Aaron didn't know what he was expecting from the closet. A boy and his cat were not one of them. What was he doing shut in the closet? Why had the ghost left him alive? Where were the owners of the house? None of it made sense to Aaron, and he wasn't the kind to think ahead far enough to speculate.

"They taped him in there," he offered the obvious, along with a small shrug.

The book that Karen flipped through offered no further clues. The contents were as foreign to Aaron as they were to Karen, save for a photo of the man who'd thrown himself from the building at the movie's start. Not the current resident, Aaron assumed. The man had owned his own apartment, and neither he nor his lover had mentioned a mother.

The mystery deepened when a photo of another family turned up by the front door. There was the little boy, smiling between his father and - a torn hole where a woman's face should be. A black curtain of hair hung around the ruined space, leaving no doubt who currently haunted the attic. As Karen's gaze rose to the boy watching through the railing, Aaron threw up a hand.

"Alright, he's evil."

He was rewarded with an unnaturally flat, forceful "Toshio" from the boy's lips. Aaron looked to Sara, vindicated.

"She's got to see this coming. Come on."

Karen, however, chose to examine the answering machine, missing the stress in the speaker's voice, the figure ghosting past the door, and the tense swell of ambient music. Aaron shook his head with equal parts disapproval and denial. 'She's dead,' the gesture said. He folded his arms across his chest, the near hand overlapping Sara's where she clutched his arm.

Braced for the worst, he raised a subtle hand, pointing unnecessarily to the background where black tendrils had begun to swarm from the ceiling. He was ready when Karen looked up into the unnatural mass of hair, and when the white eyes rolled up from their depths, fixing on the heroine's - ex-heroine's? - face. Aaron didn't flinch. He cast a sideways glance at Sara, checking for her reaction.

[tsukikoko]

"Alright, he's evil."

Sara nodded her head at Aaron's assertion, wondering to herself whether it was one ghost taking multiple forms to torment people, or multiple ghosts. In which case, this house was inundated.
"Why aye man, ya reet. Thought for a second per'aps 'e were a good ghost tah offset the bad one, like, but 'e's definitely gannin' te git someone."

When the next scare began to rise up and Sara began to curl herself ever closer to Aaron in preparation, knees rising higher as the scene progressed. She was shaking her head when Karen opened the sliding doors. Felt an urge to put her hand over her face as the camera panned round the room and a 'her' was mentioned. But when the blackness materialised and Aaron raised a hand to indicate it, she suddenly let go of his arm to grip the hand he'd laid atop her own and inhaled a soft, saddened gasp.
"Emma-"
Though the tendrils and face within had turned in Karen's direction, the shifter found herself more concerned for the older woman than their potential heroine. Was she about to die too? What led to a person being a target? Were you doomed just by being in the house?

As the scene reached a crescendo and Sara's grip tightened briefly upon her partner's arm, despite her rapid heart rate and desire to hide her face, the shifter still had a criticism to make.
"Eee man! Cannae believe that woman ain't even screamin', like. Actress divvint even look that shocked, or is it just me, like?"

Seemingly all too abruptly, the scene shifted to a familiar place and a familiar face, in the form of Emma, but a completely different tone and apparent time.

Sara tilted her head and raised an eyebrow, turning her gaze to Aaron when she addressed him, now that there was no immediate horror to grab her attention, like an in-progress car crash.
"Flashback, ya reckon?"

[MP]

Aaron nodded slowly, with only partial confidence. His hand, folded over Sara’s where she gripped his arm, lent a cozy warmth to an otherwise slaughterfest of a movie. He had no idea where the scene was going with this. Maybe Emma had known more about the house than she’d let on.

“They’ve got to be dead,” he murmured quietly to Sara, trying not to speak over the scene. The family was currently speaking to Emma, trying to get through her vacant stare.

Emma had some astral perception - her condition maybe. That was accurate at least, if somewhat movie exaggerated. Aaron wondered if the rest of the movie would have small nods to spirit phenomena.

That question was put to rest not a minute later as the realtor, stopping to drain the bathtub, was gripped by a child’s hand. Aaron tensed expectantly, his hand pressing down on Sara’s, half expecting the man to be dragged in. Instead, he only came away with a handful of long black hair. Again with the hair.

“He’s not going to say anything?” Aaron thrust out an indignant hand as the family, looking in, were seen off with an enthusiastic, if somewhat shaken smile.

“That’s two counts of real estate fraud at least,” Aaron hissed under his breath.

No realtor would knowingly sell a house containing a spiritual occupant, especially one with a history of violence. Even for those oblivious to the supernatural, there were flags and precautions in place to ensure the safety of all parties. This was blatant endangerment - and probably other astral felonies he wasn’t aware of. Todd would have a field day with this.