Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was an extravagant home, to say the least. Room after room full of things hardly anyone would bother to have around. 

The hallways were crooked mazes. Each led exactly where it needed to and nowhere else. Throughout the building's existence halls and stairways had been added in, connecting one room with the next as the owner found need for it. There was little point in connecting two rooms if one never walked between them, after all.

Seven libraries were organised by genre, though hardly a single book was complete, each stripped of everything but the bare minimum that one might need to reference and understand. After a while the owner had ceased to even save the titles -- once the internet had come around there was little need to bother. Although well-read, not a single one of the covers showed signs of wear.

Labs lined corridors where experiments, finished and failed, lay across rows and rows of tables. Some rooms were covered in blood and corpses and scalpels and bones while others buried themselves in glassware and burners and acids that sane men wouldn't dare allow in their homes. Notes were filed away in every drawer, explaining why the spatter fell the way it did or the knife hadn't broken skin or the blood sample hadn't been visible in the solution. There were answers for everything, he figured, if one were to look deep enough.

The violin had it's own tower, separated from the noise of the rest of the place. The ground floor held simple music and primary school songs, but climbing the spiral staircase brought one up to more advanced pieces that lilted and fell and turned dark when his mood did. The top of the tower was different. It was empty and clear and when he played his violin from there the notes cried and sang in a way nothing was allowed to anywhere else. The bow across the string was natural and instinctive and complicated pieces poured out, embellished beyond recognition. It was satisfying and relieving in a way he would never try to explain.

There were five bedrooms in total. Though most of them were barely used, one as the centre of everything.  From this room, the owner had begun to build. Hallway after hallway sprang out of it in the mess of doors and windows that created the palace. The first bedroom held the periodic table and ancient news clippings and lipstick that wasn't Mummy's and how to hold a violin and proof that even brothers had different fingerprints. Here things of utmost importance, things that would become instinct, things he would need forever, were tangled up indefinitely with things he wished he could lock away for just a long. This room was built before he learned to properly untangle his heart from his head.

The next two bedrooms put up were filled with elation and dysphoria, doses and needles: things the owner wasn't allowed to think about anymore.  That didn't mean he never yearned to retreat back into them; to accidentally slip back into the way he'd felt when he could escape behind those walls. The smaller one -- complete with lofted bed and metal desk, scattered with notebooks -- radiated with the thrill of his new discovery. The other, dim and cool with old wallpaper, reeked of memories of his unrelenting habit. Over the years staying out of these two rooms had become simpler, though cravings for their cold protection never truly disappeared.

The fourth was warm. It was Victorian paper and smouldering hearth and, though technically lacking a bed, had always been his favourite place to sleep. The couch was worn in all the right places from years of restless thought and though a cut crystal ash tray sat on the table, the smell of cigarette that lingered through some of the other rooms faded in lieu of the quiet scent of paper and tea. There had been bookshelves, but the books had been moved to their appropriate library, leaving room for fox tie-pins and camera phones and dear-stalker hats and things that proved that maybe his head and heart were allowed to go together after all.

A laptop sat on the desk near his armchair. It wasn't his, but it was hardly Fort Knox. Inside were all the things the owner would sit to read over and over again. He'd written none of it; some of it had never technically been written by anybody, but he knew what it would sound like if it had. Most of it was cases, but between them were the fond complaints and easy banter that had somehow become more important than any of that. Important enough for the owner to have hung the guilt soaked blue scarf near the door. I'll always believe in him. He wanted to delete those words but he couldn't. He clung to them the way he had the day they'd been written. He always would. At least now when he read them they didn't only flood guilt, but the memory of a desperate embrace that proved to the author that his belief hadn't been in vain.

Now when the old man visits this room, he is trapped in the uncertainty of nostalgia -- how could happiness be so bittersweet? Time, he supposes. Time changes everything. Stepping into the room he brushes fingers over the wool of his coat and lets the soft scent and familiar surroundings take him back to a better time. It had once been a room for thinking, but it has become his retreat. The room is now a place for the old man to go when he needs to remember that once he'd been doing all the things that he'd set out to when he'd built that very first bedroom. It was a reminder that he'd once found where he belonged, even if he couldn't go back. The British Army Browning L9A1lay on the table and each time he passes he finds himself putting a hand on it, counting in his head the times that trigger saved his life and wishing that one day the number would go up. He knows he isn't the only man to ever look at that gun and beg for a reason to use it again.

He had never called for the fifth bedroom to be built and he hates the way he was forced into it. It is aching joints and slowing reflexes and ears that don't work properly. When that room went in the hallways began to get more confusing and even the owner sometimes loses his way. Within that room lies the realisation that every palace crumbles. The owner gets locked in this room and his hands shake and his legs are weak and he is forced to look at everything that proves his time has passed.

The old man sits in his final bedroom and he fears that one day he'll forget how to get back to mismatched armchairs and two cups of tea and not his laptop and the day he does he'll let the palace fall.