Archive of Our Own ^beta

When she comes back home, she doesn't recognize where she is. Though the static in between whats left of her mind yearns for this place, she has to take a moment to piece together what exactly this is meant to be.

It likely would've been easier for her to recognize it if more of the things she'd left behind were still there. But the rules of the desert are finders keepers, and she must've been away long enough for someone else to have found this place. Distantly, she's almost surprised that no one has taken this place as their own, only the belongings inside of it. But even warped as her senses are, it doesn't take too long to realize something is off.

It takes her longer than it should to realize that the static isn't only in her mind, but hissing out of an old radio, too. If she remembered how this device worked, she'd know that it shouldn't be working at all. Old, dead batteries or plugged into an outlet with no electricity running through it, it should lay silent.

But she doesn't know how it works anymore, and it's not the static that makes the hair on her arms stand up. Well, maybe it is the static, but only that it is static instead of the droning of a voice. Because that's what moves between the static. Moves between the static of the machine, and moves between the static of her mind. She can almost hear it. But the more she reaches for who and where and why he isn't there, the further away he is.

She leaves the machine's static and lets the man she no longer knows drone on in the back of her mind as she manages to make her body move into the next room.

It's stripped nearly as bare as the last. Nearly. Shelves stand against the wall and a dresser is pressed into a corner with half its drawers ripped out. One lays thrown across the room, empty. But a few items remain on the shelves. A figure of a woman posed strangely on a circular stage, wearing a pink dress with a stiff, mesh sort of skirt. A piece of once-brightly colored plastic that made noise when she moved it. Clothes, so small they wouldn’t fit any…

A baby. This was a room for a baby. 

She's unused to her face betraying what she's trying to think as she feels her eyebrows pinch together. A room for a baby. Who’s baby? She doesn't know anyone who has a baby. The desert is not safe for babies, she had seen it a hundred, hundred, hundred times. 

Hot plastic, smoking at the tip. Burnt meat, human. The sun beat down, down, down. 

How many times had she seen it? 

It, the baby, the house. No, the home. That’s what this building was, a home. A home for a baby. A baby, and a person who takes care of the baby. Yes, a baby and their caretaker.

The answer seemed to click, to attach itself to one of the fragments of her mind, to soothe the sparking-buzzing-humming.

Once, this was a home. Once, this was her home, with a baby.

Once, this was the home of her and her baby. 

When she looks back, there are black feathers scattered on the shelves.