Curiosities (31_days, 13/11)
Title: Curiosities
Series: None; one-shot
Rating: G
Characters: Hazel
Pairing: none
Disclaimer: Amnesia: the Dark Descent was made by Frictional Games.
Word Count: around 700
Warnings: None
Spoilers: general spoilers for the entirety of Amnesia: the Dark Descent; don’t read this if you have any intention of ever playing the game.
Notes: Yeah, I think it may be possible that I am just a little bit obsessed with this game. Hazel is canonically the main character’s sister, but so far I’ve only seen her mentioned on a loading screen; she’s as good as an OC. I think I’ve taken a few liberties with the universe we’re presented with in the game, but it all takes place after it’s ended, so who knows. Written for a 31_days prompt, which I guess is the only thing that gets me to write at all. In no way first posted messily and hurriedly, because I totally made the midnight-deadline.
Summary: Hazel intends to find out what has become of her brother.
Hazel doesn’t know what has happened to her brother for a long time. She has the last letter he’s sent her before he left for Algeria, and she has heard vague murmurs of disaster striking the expedition, and Daniel is painfully absent from her life. She longs to speak to him again, so she writes him letters she cannot send, and attempts to gather information. It is all to little success: she hears of monsters and mystery and gruesome deaths, but not of Daniel.
She knows it is most likely that the desert has swallowed them all, that these wild stories have been born from half-remembered tales that have grown more strange as they were passed on, but she cannot accept it. Whether he is alive or dead, her brother is in neither Algeria nor England. She will know the truth, and if she must see her brother buried, she will only do so after she has laid eyes on his remains.
(Her husband teases her about being the ever-dutiful sister when she is so otherwise-dedicated to ‘unladylike’ pursuits, but he doesn’t truly understand that she owes him this; that without Daniel she might well not have lived to become a woman, what he suffered to ensure she did.)
Hazel is a widow and a grandmother before she grows tired of running into impossible dead ends in England. She has waited for the truth to find its way to her for too long, so she will set out for it instead.
It is still difficult, but no longer impossible, to piece together the picture of what might have happened from what little they are willing to tell her. And it is an unearthly picture; a treasure map that leads-to her surprise-briefly back to England, and then on to a distant and abandoned part of Prussia, and an ancient ruined castle.
It cannot truly have been in ruins for so long, Brennenburg was inhabited in her lifetime, but these ruins are older than her entire family line. It is only one more impossible truth she has been faced with, and it is where she must go if she is to learn what became of her brother and what in the heavens-although she thinks that, theologically speaking, it is more likely from the hells-he has been caught up in.
It is much too easy to find her way through the castle (from the outside it is a pile of rubble, and most of its chambers and corridors have collapsed), and she knows that the light streaming in is not the sun’s (not hers, anyway). It is as if the structure itself was ever only a path, and now it has given up any pretense to the contrary, as it takes her down and down (so far, so inconceivably far down; how could they have dug this deep in the first place?).
At the end, there is only an empty room, where a cold and silent fire burns endlessly. She finds Daniel’s diary, and her heart sings because the letters she knows he has written her are there, tucked inside the front cover as they always are.
As she makes her way back up, it seems as though stories seep up from the stones, from the diary and the letters and documents gathered within it, up into her mind, and she understands they wish to be told and remembered.
They are not good stories, and in the end her brother was not a good man, but perhaps she herself is now no longer a good woman, because it does not disgust or frighten her.
It takes a long while for her eyes to readjust to the yellow-white warmth of the midday sun, and the world will never be as comfortably natural to her as it used to be and still should, but she will not let curiousity consume her.
She will document and immortalize this entire experience-hers, and Daniel’s, and that of the stones and the castle and those who used to live in it-and that will have to be enough for her.
Hazel must be the storyteller; not the adventurer. (That has always been Daniel, and if she is correct, it still is.)