Work Text:
It’s just turning warm when Auguste decides that the world of journalism can do without him for a few months, and bundles Laurent off with him to the old family holiday house. Really, ‘holiday house’ is a generous description, more like an old estate that's been in their family for generations, that everyone mostly forgets about because they’re rich enough to hold onto it without having to particularly care. But, it's in decent shape, quietly isolated in its patch of countryside, and makes for a good holiday house. The fact no one's used it as such before just means he'll have to be the first.
It’s the kind of old house people think of when they think of old houses, aged and stately. With gardens to slowly prune back into shape in the times you feel like leaving your four-poster bed, and plenty of corners to eventually getting around to dusting. In the long and lazy hours, the kind of hours you can spend when you have your own patch of countryside, the strange things start.
Sounds that echo down the corridor, faint, like they're coming behind closed doors. At first chatter and laughter, music and the clink of glasses, and then shouts. And screams, and bangs. When Auguste tells Laurent what he can hear, Laurent agrees that it sounds like a party. A party where something bad happened.
There's more. Late at night sometimes, when half the lights are off, Auguste thinks he can make out through the dimness the outlines of dark puddles on the ground. Always in the same places, but always gone in the light. And, a few times blinking awake in the night to take a sip of water or pull up a blanket, he's sure later that he remembers someone standing on the other side of the room. Just standing, waiting, maybe watching. But it’s only ever something he remembers later, because somehow the figure isn't one that startles him at the time. Not something menacing, even glimpsed as it is out of the corner of his eye.
One day, they stumble onto a cache of odds and ends while walking the east wing. A few pads of paper and some old-fashioned personal items, cufflinks, razors, spread through the desk and cabinets of what had once been a study. From the bottom of one drawer Laurent pulls out an ornate wooden box, and opens it to reveal a revolver. It slams shut again a moment later, along with the door to the room, and—by the sounds of it—the doors down the rest of the corridor.
One other day, Auguste is exploring the storage rooms in the back when he comes across another stain on the ground, one that definitely doesn't disappear. When he bends down, runs his hand over the dark colour sunk into the stone, the bulb above begins to flicker. In the small amount of evening light that shows through the tiny, dirty windows, he sees a flash of another scene—the back door kicked in, a man standing before it, the man’s suit a style from decades ago.
“I think the house is haunted,” Auguste announces over breakfast without preamble, eggs halfway to his mouth.
Laurent just blinks at him, twice. “You’re accepting that concept fairly easily.”
“Well,” he replies, “I’ve had a while to get used to the idea.”
“Alright,” says Laurent. “What do we know about this place?”
There are ledgers in the house, they find them on the bookshelves and in the desk drawers, quite meticulously kept. But when all of them open to only coded entries, Laurent reminds Auguste that family legend went that their old money once upon a time had come from mob ties. One of those moments, the big ones with slamming doors and windows rattling in some unseen force, happens again when Auguste drops a pen that rolls under a dresser, and moves it to find an old smashed pocket watch. The protest of the house around him continues as he leans down to pick it up, holding it tight in this palm.
“Is this yours?” he whispers out loud. Only softly, but the banging stops.
“You can make yourself seen, I know,” he goes on. “Come on. Talk to me.”
He does.
He’s a tall man, dark, with a nice smile. A cop from the 1940s killed on an attempted raid of this house by the revolver that they'd found. He can look fairly substantial when he wants to, apparently, and communicate in a normal, speaking fashion sans incorporeal banging. His name is Damen.
He and Auguste talk. Damen doesn't like to talk much about the end of his life, but he is full of fascinating stories of the world before that. And after seven decades in an empty house he’s awfully curious about the modern world. It's nice, and almost just like having a very chatty roommate, one who's still in his twenties after serving in World War II and who flickers out of existence when he leaves the room instead of walking out the door.
Auguste puts a phone call through to his father and, after the chit-chat, asks if he knows any more about their family's supposed mob ties. After some prodding, Aleron admits that the house had been the scene of a shootout in the 40s when police raided a party attended by more than a couple of major underworld figures. Two policemen and a handful of guests were left dead, which is the reason the house has stood largely empty since then. He finds the question odd enough that he asks tentatively afterwards about Auguste's well-being.
“I’m fine,” Auguste replies easily. “Laurent always told me I needed to take more time off work.”
“I don't know if Laurent ever meant you should hole yourself up into some isolated mansion. You were always one to prefer the crowds, son, are you sure you want to stay the whole summer there?”
Auguste huffs. “You don't have to speak for Laurent,” he says. “I thought I could use a holiday, and this place is interesting.”
“It is that,” Aleron muses, half-distractedly.
It is a bit of a surprise, the day he walks out onto the back porch to see Damen sitting stiffly in one of the deck chairs, gaze on Laurent as he swims a lap across the pool. The ghost has the capability for affecting a kind of inhuman, preternatural stillness, but this doesn't seem to be that kind of inattention.
“Are you,” Auguste begins cautiously, “checking out my brother?”
Damen jumps. “Uh,” he says.
“Yes,” Laurent answers crisply, pulling himself by a standing position by the pool edge.
Damen dissolves into an indistinct series of splutters not entirely unlike the rattling of furniture as Auguste looks over at Laurent.
“So you can see him too, when I’m not here,” he says. “I’d been wondering.”
Laurent shrugs one bare shoulder fluidly. “Of course.”
Laurent tells him, later, that he'd managed to get out of Damen a bit more about the raid that he’d died in. The other policeman killed, his lieutenant, was his father, and Damen has long suspected that the raid had gone so wrong because they'd been sold out. By another cop, his brother. A family dynasty kind of thing.
His father isn't here, though, Damen tells Auguste when he asks. There are a few other presences, echoes left behind, but none as strong as him these last few decades. It had been a lonely existence. Until now.
At Laurent’s insistence Auguste makes a few more phone calls. From some of his journalistic sources he manages to track down that Damen's brother is still alive, living in a nursing home only a few hours drive away. He calls there too, claiming to be working on a book about organised crime in the mid 20th century, and talks himself into being allowed to set up an appointment for an interview.
Damen is somewhat unsure about finding out how he’d fare in a car ride, and Laurent offers drily to keep him company at the house until Auguste comes back with news. They've been spending more time together, Auguste has noticed, having come into many a room recently to find them ensconced in conversation. He wonders how one would go about giving the brother talk to a ghost.
Kastor is a clear-headed man. Slowed by his age but still mobile, he greets Auguste and his supposed interview with a quiet resolve. Auguste broaches the subject tentatively, of his old career, of his family, of the raid at the party. He's long learnt in this job how to ask the awkward questions.
“You have to understand,” Kastor says eventually, voice scratchy. “The mob, the networks, we all knew we could never take them down. I ran into them everywhere, with a stake in everything, and one day they—” he breaks off.
“Yes?” Auguste prompts.
Kastor is silent for a moment, before he finally continues, “One day they came to me wanting to talk. Offering a deal. And I thought, maybe we can do this? Come to some kind of understanding, some way to coexist if no one will ever win?”
He coughs, and it sounds like it hurts.
“It sounded like a good deal. They wanted a little warning before certain things happened, and they said they'd drop me a line sometimes when they needed a little cleanup and wouldn't mind us helping out. We tried to raid them all the time, you know, and they'd let us in with a smirk and wave us goodbye after. Always knew how to hide. So I thought, why not? What would giving a heads-up hurt? And if they’d give us something, then it was better than when we had nothing.”
A well-wrinkled fist clenches over the tabletop, stiff fingers catching on the plastic lace cover before the old man goes on.
“But, I didn’t know. They had someone new in charge, someone who threw a big party in his mansion and decided he wanted a new status quo. Part of that was coming to me. The other part, they wanted to make a statement. And so the next raid, it wasn’t the same as before. They fought back. We lost people.”
The plastic crinkles again.
“I lost people.”
“I see,” Auguste says, and puts down the pencil he was pretending to write notes with.
Damen looks lighter when he Auguste tells him, as he listens to the aged but firm voice on the recording playback. Light in a way that makes him seem like he ought to be floating toward the ceiling. Auguste hadn’t been sure what difference it would make, exactly, for Damen to hear how it had happened, to know what his brother had done and meant and wanted and what he hadn’t. But, apparently, it makes something. And something better than before.
He wonders if this is the end, if this means Damen will move on or whatever now that he knows the truth. But no, he's still there the next day, and the one after that. Although the halls don’t quite feel the same anymore, more often lit now with laughter and unburdened voices. Sometimes the lights on the walls seem brighter too.
“I’m glad,” Auguste says to Laurent two weeks after his return from the nursing home, “that you two became friends. I suppose you found some things in common?”
Laurent casts him a look. “Not that much,” he replies. Then his mouth softens. “But we're working on it.”
They watch a movie that afternoon on Auguste’s laptop, all three of them. Damen appears to be more excited about how bright the colours are than about the story. Laurent spends slightly less time deriding the quality of modern film than he usually does. Later in the evening, Auguste walks past the open doorway of the high-ceilinged library room to catch a glimpse of Damen standing by the bookshelf muttering, “People are still reading Fitzgerald? Really?”
Laurent, sitting in one of the tightly-stuffed armchairs, laughs in the small, quiet way that he does.
Eventually, the summer ends. It couldn’t last forever, even if it had started to feel like it. Eventually the time comes for Auguste to move back to the city, back to his life, away from the old house and its slice of the past. And it comes firmly enough it can’t be ignored or postponed any longer.
He's packing when Laurent appears and tells him he doesn't want to go. It's both a shock and not a shock, and Auguste’s throat feels thick as he swallows and gets out, “You’re sure that you want to stay, then? With him?”
Laurent nods. “I want to stay,” he repeats. “I want you to go back without me. And,” he goes on, voice steady, “I want you to stop thinking about what else could have happened."
Auguste exhales in a sharp rush.
Laurent's lips shift, not quite into a smile. “It was random chance,” he says quietly, “the kind people just get sometimes. That I was in the apartment when the fire started and you weren't.”
He does think about it. It’s true. “If I hadn’t gone out that night--”
“It was bad, Auguste. And fast. You probably wouldn't have been able to save me, and you probably wouldn't have made it out either.”
Auguste breathes back in, and it sounds like a gasp. What he says is, “You’ll be happy here, won’t you?”
Laurent nods, and now he is smiling. “I will.” Then, “Maybe you can come back to visit.”
Auguste smiles too, and his face feels damp. “Should do.”
He can see them in the upstairs window as he drives away, standing together, one hand each raised in a wave and the others clasped between them. The old house stands grand in the morning light. Auguste says a last silent goodbye into his rearview mirror.
A blink, and the window is empty.