Fernweh (31_days, 24/11)
Title: Fernweh
Series: None; one-shot
Rating: G
Characters: Daniel
Pairing: none
Disclaimer: Amnesia: the Dark Descent was made by Frictional Games.
Word Count: around 278
Warnings: None
Spoilers: General spoilers for the entirety of Amnesia: the Dark Descent; it might not ruin your enjoyment of the game, but it does spoil one of the endings.
Notes: That’s three fics now, and I still haven’t finished the game. 31_days’ prompt for today is nothing ever ends and although the game unfortunately does end, I really don’t want it to. :P
Summary: For years, Daniel’s life is perfectly ordinary, but it doesn’t last.
All the things he’s done and seen seem almost unreal from a safe distance, and he can fit himself back into his old life with an ease that surprises him. For years, his life is perfectly normal and blessedly boring; he goes on predictable expeditions where he finds absolutely no mystical relics in otherworldly ruins, but the peace doesn’t last.
It comes in his dreams first, where his conscious mind can’t interfere, when he sees beautifully impossible vistas even more imposing than those the Orb had first shown him, that leave him with a sense of wistful longing upon waking. It is preposterous to feel nostalgic for an unattainable place he has never truly laid eyes on, and he refuses to pay them any mind.
It’s a method that works well enough until he begins to remember experiences in that other world; remembers more clearly walking through streets under a bright-dark sky or tracing silk-rough stone than he does telling his sister to hide and be quiet or the relief he felt when their father passed. He begins to write again, his recollection of his own life in as much detail as he remembers, and those other ones in as much detail as he can find words for in English.
It isn’t enough to clear his head of them, though, and in time he thinks he will only recall his own life through this other filter: he has already begun to see glimpses of the other place, when a busy street in London is at the same time a broad avenue flanked by sandstone-marbled buildings and midday is bathed in the black light of an absent, crescent moon.