❝A banshee does not bring or cause death but warns loved one that a death is near which gives the family a chance to prepare.❞
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[twilight saga]
[rosalie hale x oc]
[plot idea - @acciokeanureeves]
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❝ When you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try. ❞
- Ethan Hawke
For as long as Laurel Newton can remember, she has always heard voices in her head. As soon as she could tell her parents and teachers as a toddler, she did. They would smile at her a slightly patronizing smile, pat her head, and nod their heads while mhmm-ing before they would tell her to run along. It was a confusing reaction because she tried to tell them that sometimes she couldn't understand the voices but when she did, they frightened her or said grown-up things she couldn't understand.
When she was older and still going to parents and teachers about the voices, her parents finally sat her down and told her that she was too old for imaginary friends. It was then that Laurel realized that no one had ever believed her when she told them about the voices. That realization was followed shortly by the understanding that perhaps it was better that the voices were written off as a child's imagination.
There was a woman who lived down the street from the Newton's when they lived in Pennsylvania. Laurel distantly has a memory of that time but the one thing that little Laurel remembers are the whispers of her parents and the whole neighborhood. So, when asked a week after The Talk, Laurel confessed that there were no more voices even as they whispered in her head.
The migraines didn't start until Laurel hit puberty. Gradually, as if a veil was being pulled back, the voices have been growing louder and louder. The day she bleeds for the first time is also the day she gets her first migraine. It rips through her head and leaves her gasping, vision fading for a split second. She was allowed to skip school, left in bed laying in fetal position with one hand clutching her head and the other her abdomen. The pain from both places was torturous. This wouldn't be the only migraine Laurel gets, hundreds more were waiting in store for her but rarely would they get as painful as this first one.
The final strange first that Laurel encounters as a child happens the night before a neighbor dies. Throughout the day, the voices have become louder, more frantic like bees buzzing around in her head. Still, they aren't loud enough to cause a migraine or a headache, just a twinge in the back of her head that's easy enough to ignore. Something feels off that night but not knowing what, Laurel goes to sleep, wrapped up in blankets and ready for a dreamless sleep (or maybe something pleasant if the Sandman is kind enough).
It's just after midnight when Laurel wakes, bolting upright in bed, blood trickling out of her nose and mouth open in a scream. It's a loud, shrill sound that one would think it could break glass; and try as she might, Laurel can't stop screaming, can't even close her mouth. It goes on and on and one. No one comes to her room or yells at her to stop screaming or go back to sleep. She just screams all night long.
Morning eventually comes and just as the sun peeks over the horizon, the screaming stops. There's a ringing in Laurel's ears as she falls forward, eyes bloodshot and vision blurry. On shaky legs, she stands and stumbles to the bathroom to clean the dried blood off her upper lip. Then she stumbles back to her room to collapse into bed where Laurel promptly passed out, exhausted and throat sore.
It's early afternoon when Laurel rouses again and goes downstairs. Her parents had tried multiple times to wake her during the day but she remained dead to the world. There's a bowl of cereal at the table waiting for her and she stumbles to it, body not yet shaking off the clutches of sleep but demanding sustenance all the same.
When questioned about her appearance, or lack of it through the day, Laurel blames a rough night on nightmares. Questioning leads her parents to reveal that as a baby she was prone to silent screaming during the night. Nothing used to console her and her parents only learned about the events when they went to give her nightly feeds that she hadn't cried for yet. It was strange and unnerving to the, then, newly parents but it eventually stopped so there was no concern.
Laurel decides to keep to the nightmare story about screaming all night. This was just another secret she would have to keep. She realized it had some relation to the voices because when asked, she discovered that for the first time that she can remember, her head is silent of outside voices.
The Newtons don't learn about the dead neighbor until the following day.
