graves .

# DIGGS / GRAVES .   private , affiliated multimuse for original characters written by kt ( 27 + she/her ) sideblog follows back from @witcheri​ 

CARRD — ( rules + muse info )

AN EXPLORATION OF :   what makes a house haunted , childhoods lost , hearts broken , and the sins of the father coming back on the children

why were the mundane tasks the hardest? grocery shopping was the most mundane thing a person could do. walking down the aisles, perusing different types of pasta and sauce. days, weeks, months passed and jasper was still trying to get back into the swing of things. he was trying to be a real person again, but he didn't know how to be single. he didn't know how to be a bachelor. he lived by himself for years before he moved in with silas, and it was fine. he was fine. everything was just ... fine. after the divorce, jasper moved back into a condo by himself and everything was just so ... quiet. he was hyperaware of how alone he was, and it was more lonely than he thought a person could ever be.

being the child of divorce was freaking weird. no, scratch that. that would require sevyn's parents to be divorced. they weren't. technically, they were like, legally separated or whatever. was it even a legal one? they were separated. and that was probably for the better. the only thing they had in common was a child, and sevyn didn't know what they ever saw in each other. they were in love once, or something close to it. sevyn remembered seeing them laugh together a lot when she was younger. he was one of the only people that could make scarlet laugh. she didn't laugh anymore.

the treehouse was old, and was in a state of disrepair like the rest of the house. the wood was old, nails missing. there was no way it was safe to climb that board ladder and honestly, sevyn wondered if it ever was. she never knew her grandfather, so there were a lot of unanswered questions. was he a handyman? did he build it himself, or did he hire someone? did silas help? or her mom? her aunts? whenever she asked about simon, they always got that haunted look in their eyes. she stopped asking a long time ago. she hoped that whoever built the treehouse knew what they were doing.

it was monday, which was a good enough excuse for scarlet to drink. it was hypocritical, the way she gave her brother shit for drowning his sorrows in booze when she did the same thing. she could give excuses for days about that. it's not the same. i don't drink that much. it's just wine. if she were more stable like she pretended to be, she may have seen all the red flags. the graves siblings had more in common than any of them would readily admit, and it wasn't just the triplets. she saw pieces of herself in silas, in sabine, and in sloane. she wondered if that was by nature or by nurture. were they all really just that similar, or did they each take fragments of scarlet with them as she chipped away from her person, piece by piece until all that was left was the ghost of the person she was before.

when she was younger, scarlet used to swear that there was an invisible string tying her to her siblings. at least, there was an invisible string tying her to sabine and silas. if twin telepathy was a thing, the triplets must have had that times one hundred. she never felt the same bond with @sloanegraves . she always felt one step removed from her youngest sibling. by the time sloane was born, their parents were already having problems, and scarlet, being the oldest by mere minutes, was promoted from big sister to young mother, taking care of all three of her siblings because she realized that if she didn't, no one ever would. sloane fell victim to their parents sins, falling somewhere between scarlet's sibling and her child. there were times when she looked at the bond between her own daughter and her younger sister and thought they were more like sisters than scarlet and sloane would ever be.

scarlet didn't remember it being this cold. she had turned the thermostat up one degree, and then two. another and then another. she stopped at seventy two because anything higher than that seemed excessive. at the restaurant, she always wore short sleeved blouses because she spent so much of her time cooking on the stovetop or pulling things out of the ovens. she was used to that kind of heat in the kitchen. she was cooking now, but the heat did nothing to warm the ice in her veins. she pulled the oven door open and a chill ran down her spine. rolling her shoulders, she pulled the fresh baked loaf of bread out of the oven and slid the pan on top of the stove. she hung the oven mitt ( the same one her mother had always used ) up on it's hook and turned the oven off, even though she didn't really want to. she felt like turning it off was removing the only source of heat in the whole house. it was july in virginia, there was no reason for it to be that cold outside or inside the house.