Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 19

(Author's note: Alright everyone, hold on to your butts.)

Lilly closed and locked the front door behind her as they stepped inside, and she watched as the other woman took a few steps into the hallway, looking around what appeared to be a living room before heading back to her. She pointed to a hall tree that hugged the right wall, and kicked off her shoes.

"Your coat," Lilly said, and then seemed to pause for a moment. She followed the other woman's gaze to the floor beside the hall tree bench, where a pair of black Chelsea boots sat neatly lined up against the wall baseboard. Mens' boots, she could tell by the size, but as she looked back up at Lilly to try and gauge what had drawn the other woman's attention to them, Lilly had disappeared out of the hallway.

Feeling slightly awkward at having been abandoned so soon after entering someone else's house, she removed her own shoes and lay them next to the innocuous pair of black boots that she could only assume belonged to Nathan Donfort. Hanging her coat on the only open hook remaining on the hall tree, she took a tentative few steps into the living room as Lilly reappeared.

"Hannah?" Lilly called out, and after a moment, she felt her breathing hitch as a female voice sounded from somewhere above their heads, a voice that was undeniably Hannah Donfort's.

"I'm here," came the reply, and all she could do was stare at Lilly in apprehension as she heard the sound of footfall on the stairs that connected to the front hallway. The sound of the person walking grew louder and closer as she stared at the other woman, and then as Lilly's face broke into a smile, she turned around to face the woman now standing behind her.

Hannah stood still in the living room entry way, neither of the three women saying anything as they took each other in. She stared silently into the eyes of the woman that she had been fighting so hard to find, and found herself marvelling at the surreal, awful beauty of it all - Hannah's light blue eyes were exactly as she thought they would be; captivating and steady, but with an added weight to them that had not been present in the photos that she had seen.

They held fatigue, certainly, and that fatigue seemed to exude from every single aspect of her, but they also held a deep and profound sadness that she knew had not been present in the photos because the horror of what Richy had done to his childhood friend was yet to happen and to subsequently change those eyes forever.

Both of the Donfort sisters were younger than herself, but they both had a maturity of stance that belied their years, something that she would now never be able to tell if such solemnity had been granted to them by virtue of their personalities or forced upon them by the brutality of circumstance.

She immediately saw that Hannah appeared to be wearing the same clothes that she had been when she was on the video call with Alan that had confirmed her rescue. Her white shirt still bore the dust and dirt from her captivity, and her light blue stonewashed jeans were faded and dull from wear. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, the dark brown of it still muted with dirt and grime, but despite her disheveled appearance, she still looked as beautiful and regal as she had in every single one of her photos.

She swallowed hard as she stared into Hannah's eyes, and then reached a quizzical hand up to her own face as she felt something hot and wet splashing onto her cheeks. As she looked down at her fingers in detached curiosity to see what it was, she saw the translucent glimmer of tears on her fingertips as they dripped off of them and onto the floor at her feet. By the time that she had looked up again, however, Hannah was suddenly in front of her and was pulling her into her arms, arms that were strong and yet also gentle, painfully thin but also soothingly warm as they wrapped around her.

Hannah smelled like old sweat and rock dust and tears as she pressed her face into the slope of the other woman's shoulder, breathing her in deeply as they held onto each other tightly. It was a smell that she knew that she would never forget - not because of any sort of unpleasantness about it, but because it was a testament to the horror that the other woman had gone through, would likely still go through in some shape or form for the rest of her life, and it was also evidence of the incredible strength and resilience that she'd possessed to even be standing there at all.