Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Lee stood awash in the golden light of his kitchen window, looking out over the dried grass of his backyard. The half-length curtains, crookedly hand-sewn by Tenten and speckled with cheery sunflowers, fluttered in the soft breeze drifting through the window screen.

It was autumn, and everything smelled of smoke.

Behind the thin spines of the maples that separated his yard from his one-street-over neighbor’s, the sun was starting to set. Gloaming light, stained orange by the leaves’ last dying hurrahs, filtered through the pale yellow cotton of the curtains and painted his fingers gold where they drummed on the steel behind the sink.

The house was old, narrow, taller than it was wide, and it seemed to tilt to and fro when the wind blew, the joists groaning and settling. It needed a lot of repair work, and the pipes spat rust before the water ran clear, the spigot juddering when Lee turned it on to wash the dust of moving day off his hands. But the house was his very own, his name on the deed and a mortgage looming in his bank account. Run-down though it may have been, his own house was the first sign of his true adult life opening up before him, perhaps a bit lately bloomed, but no less promising for it.

Lee grinned, and the shine of his teeth in the sunset flashed back at him from the windowpane.

Lee’s papa and his friends had already left, thanked handsomely for their assistance with boxes of pizza that sweated grease (Meat Lover’s for Tenten and Pimiento and Olive for Neji) and clanking brown bottles of beer that would sit untouched in Lee’s fridge until the next time he had company. Getting Gai into the house had been a bit of an ordeal, Neji and Lee each taking one side of his wheelchair to hoist him up the two bowing steps that led to the house’s sagging veranda. Lee had apologized profusely all along--he didn’t have permission yet from the building inspector to install a ramp. His papa would only ever be able to explore the first of the house’s three narrow storeys, but there was nothing to be done about that. Everything more accessible that Lee had looked at had been priced far out of his budget.

Papa had declared himself the chief decorator, while Neji and Tenten sweated and huffed and dragged Lee’s heavy wooden furniture up the creaking stairwell. The result had been slightly more turtle-themed decor than Lee himself would have selected, but the reminders of his childhood home were more than welcome, and Papa seemed to thrive with a task at hand. It had been a challenge unto itself to prevent him from hoisting himself onto the kitchen counters to arrange Lee’s cabinets.

The few remaining packed cardboard boxes tilted unevenly from their perches against the freshly painted walls, all sterile and bright white. Lee would get to them tomorrow, he promised himself, bright and early. He had no desire to live as Tenten did, in an apartment that was never quite fully unpacked, digging items out of old moving boxes that gradually transformed themselves into dusty, sagging storage containers. Lee had to turn himself sideways to angle past them and up the stairs to the largest of the house’s three bedrooms, his aching joints and muscles grumbling as he folded a slice of cold pizza in half and bit it off, slick melted cheese clinging to his teeth and too-sweet sauce coating his tongue. Lee was no slouch in the fitness department, but the work involved in moving an entire household in just a few hours tugged at the muscles differently, made them work harder.

Lee clenched a fist. If he didn’t condition his body so that his next move was painless, he would subject himself to a full week of Papa’s 24-hour maximum training workout! Not that he planned to move again anytime soon. The extra bedrooms were an investment, a forever home for his family-to-be. Lee had no prospects for such a union--not yet, anyway--but he hoped that his future spouse and children would love the house as much as he did.

And he loved it well, he thought, with all its creaks and quirks and oddities. He ran a finger along the round windowsill of his bedroom, the porthole of the window staring out into the narrow, cobbled street. The house was so closely situated to its next door neighbors that it had no windows on the sides, lest Lee find himself staring into his neighbor’s bedroom when he opened the curtains in the morning. The only sources of natural light were the panes of glass placed in the front and back of each slender room, gazing out into the uneven paving that marked the house’s side street and the scraggly, overgrown plot behind that excused itself as a backyard. The effect was one of oddly angled brightness, shafts of dusty light that seemed to compete with one another at sun-up and sun-down, and which left the interior in grey shadow during the overhead brightness of midday.

Windows aside, the house was bursting with its own curiosities--closets that were too thin to hold more than a single, puffy coat; spindly banisters cracked as if something had been thrown against them with great weight (these, Lee vowed to fix the following weekend); a single red-painted step on the way up to the third floor; and too-few studs in the framing, as Tenten discovered upon scanning the walls for a suitable location for Lee’s weight rack.

And then, of course, there was the dumbwaiter.

Lee stared at it out of the corner of his eye as he flopped, arms and legs akimbo, on the comfort of his old mattress and its fresh sheets, the scents of new paint and old dust warring in his nose. Above his bed on the ceiling was a water stain in the shape of a heart: though the walls had been painted before he moved in, the ceilings, it seemed, had not.

Tenten had declared the dumbwaiter ‘creepy as hell’ when Lee had first shown his friends around the house, before he had settled on buying it. The realtor, who had been trying to sell the house for several months, after it had stood empty and fallen into disrepair, had offered to have it boarded up before Lee moved in, but he had declined. Lee himself found it charming, just another memento of the old house’s history and provenance, like a tiny, in-built doorway to the past. The door creaked when Lee had eased it open to reveal its interior, a square no larger than a child’s body, coated in peeling varnish. The iron wheel that raised and lowered the mechanism had long ago rusted in place, and despite both Lee’s and Neji’s best efforts and considerable elbow grease, neither had been able to free the thing and cause it to move.

Tenten had refused to touch it.

Getting the dumbwaiter back into action was at the very bottom of Lee’s to-do list, though. The contraption had little utility for a man who prided himself on racing himself up and down the stairs, attempting to beat his own personal best speed every time. And besides, the panel that opened into the kitchen had been covered up by Lee’s new refrigerator, with its humming white doors and pull-out freezer stuffed with protein-packed tupperware, courtesy of Gai. Lee had yet to find the dumbwaiter’s door on the upper floor either; he assumed it had been painted over. Perhaps he would find it in one of the third floor’s many tiny closets.

Lee felt his eyes drifting closed as he lay there on his bed, shirtless but still in his most well-worn pair of jeans. Sweat and exhaustion stuck his eyelashes closed, his thoughts aimless and drifting. He had meant to shower before sleeping, but the heaviness of his limbs made the notion of standing to bathe seem an insurmountable task. Tomorrow, he thought, I’ll do it tomorrow.

The last thing he saw before his eyes went dark was the door of the dumbwaiter, sealed shut.

Lee awoke in blackness, his mouth cotton-dry and lips scratchy from snoring open-mouthed. He was no less tired than he had been before falling asleep; his own fault for ignoring his body’s well-oiled routines. His internal clock told him it must have been after midnight, but his own alarm clock with its glowing white face and old fashioned bells had yet to be liberated from the depths of packing tape and bubble wrap.

His stomach lurched with the familiarity of vertigo, the tilting of his inner ear telling him he was sinking down, down. His stomach rose to meet his throat, the feeling like descending too fast in an elevator. He blinked sleep from his eyes but found the room still pitch black. The moon must have been directly overhead. It was a waning crescent tonight, anyway--as Lee knew from his long friendship with Tenten and her fascination with the occult--unlikely to shed much light through the heavy curtain drawn across his single porthole window.

He stretched his arms and legs, reaching out to orient himself in the unfamiliarity of his new room, and his limbs dragged as if moving underwater. Much sooner than he expected, his hands and feet met walls. That was odd; his bed was only pressed up against a single wall behind the headboard. Lee felt around with groping palms and the soles of his stocking feet, seeking corners. The walls were all too close.

He was in a box.

He scowled at what he assumed was the ceiling. He must have still been dreaming.

Above him he heard a warbling sound, faint but not growing distant as it should have if he were falling like he felt he was. If anything, it seemed to be coming closer. Closing in on him from above.

Lee blinked his eyes against the black and found no more illumination than before. The sound resolved into clarity, less than a foot from his face. Crying, but not the way a human cried. There was an edge to the sound, raw and animal, like the whining of a dog denied its bone or a cat begging for its food. The noise drew closer, inches from his face. Lee felt hot, wet breath against the tip of his nose.

He woke up with his eyes watering, his throat sore like he’d just finished a crying jag.

On the wall, the door of the dumbwaiter hung slightly ajar.