Work Text:
Dani had never known death before Eddie.
Not really.
Her childhood had been adorned with the numerous funerals of various church members, her attendance nothing more than a mere formality. Or, occasionally, a memorable potluck or chance to run around with her church friends, but still, not much more than a formality.
She had always cherished her fortune that her grandparents were all still living. Breathing. Not dead.
Sure, family friends had passed, but no one had forced her to grapple with the inevitability of death’s reins.
How suddenly it comes to call.
How definite it is.
How cold and detached it could leave her feeling.
But, then there was Eddie.
And death had crashed through her front door.
Or, more accurately, crashed into Eddie.
********
The loss of Eddie sent her into a tailspin.
He was everywhere.
His glowing eyes.
Haunting her.
Begging her to rethink leaving him.
Seeking affirmation that maybe part of Dani was the perfect wife he wanted her to be.
Days and weeks and months of stares.
Piercing stares in hidden mirrors.
In hallways and bathrooms and funeral parlors.
Cold, hollow, unyielding.
And Dani couldn’t cope.
She couldn’t take the sympathies of his family.
Couldn’t accept that no one would ever know the truth about his last few moments alive.
That Eddie had died devastated and heartbroken.
That the happily engaged Eddie everyone believed in was a lie.
That Dani had caused him pain in his last moments.
And so, Dani fled.
********
England was a new start for Dani.
A place to forget.
A place to escape the stares and glowing reminders.
There Eddie appeared less and less.
And there was the au pair position.
Taking the helm of rearing the Wingrave children,
Dani knew she had her work cut out for her.
And her heart still ached.
But there was less and less of Eddie,
fewer and fewer remnants of death.
She could pretend.
Pretend she hadn’t fled her previous life at the first sign of death.
Pretend Eddie’s lingering stares were a figment of her imagination.
Pretend she wasn’t haunted.
Suppress.
Stifle.
Avoid.
Channel her grief into raising the orphaned children.
And so, Dani found herself at home with the two children, the cook, the gardener and the housekeeper.
Five who knew death too well.
Could discuss it.
Could acknowledge it.
Could feel it.
But Dani couldn’t.
And Dani didn’t know if she ever would.
Or if she’d face her own ghosts.
The ghosts of Bly Manor were nothing new to the children.
In fact, they were well accustomed to them and accepted them as part of the house.
Part of life.
Rather than fearing death and the afterlife, they focused on ensuring the safety of their adults who weren’t yet aware.
Unaware of Rebecca.
And Peter.
Viola.
And the Others.
For the children were still shaken from the loss of their previous au pair.
Knowing exactly what took her.
What took Peter Quill too.
And the ghosts that lingered.
********
The inhabitants of the manor had all coped with the deaths differently.
The children dangled precariously between apathetic and disturbed.
Owen devoted himself to his job and caring for his elderly mother.
Jamie let her anger burn.
And Hannah paid her respects.
A simple ritual of remembrance.
The acceptance of death as a reality and something one cannot contend with.
A simple act.
Spirituality without any religion.
Remembrance within a chapel, without the mention of a heaven or a hell.
The housekeeper’s candles struck a chord in Dani.
For they were a flicker of remembrance and honor of the lives that had been.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
And for Dani, death began to lose its cacophonic roar.
The simple flames banished the darkness that had brought her so far from home.
Although, now, the manor was her home.
********
After Owen’s mother passed, Dani drew upon Hannah’s ritual for the first time.
The thought of a funeral had been too much.
She had been paralyzed by memories of Eddie.
Of black dresses.
Of mourning family members and half-truths.
And so, she stayed at Bly.
It felt amiss.
To see her friend in pain and be unable to comfort him.
To be unable to pay honor to the woman that had invariably led Owen to Bly.
In her grief she wandered the manor.
Then the grounds.
Anything to forget Eddie’s funeral.
That dress.
The exhilarating feeling of Jamie unzipping the dress tainted with the vision of Eddie.
Anything to erase mortality from her mind.
For even one brief moment.
And so, she took a walk that led her into the chapel’s waiting doors.
A place of worship with no worshippers.
A site of ritual.
Nothing more,
nothing less.
A place where she could grieve and mourn.
A way to honor Owen’s mother without taking up space she felt uncomfortable in.
For the funeral was a space she felt wrong in.
A space that felt reserved for those who knew Owen’s mother.
And after playing the part of the mourning fiancee rather than the mourning ex at Eddie’s funeral, Dani couldn’t take up that space anymore than she already had.
Her mourning for Eddie hadn’t been fake.
It hadn’t been through the lens of a lover that everyone thought it had been.
But it hadn’t been fake.
The day was about Owen and his mother. Not her dead ex-fiancee.
For Dani, the funeral would only evoke memories of Eddie.
And so, the chapel welcomed her, as it had welcomed Flora and Hannah too.
Just Dani, Hannah, Flora, the burial plots, the empty pews, and the altar.
Dani was unsure how she found herself in front of the candles inspecting the layers upon layers of melted wax.
A sign of the longevity of Hannah’s remembrance and honoring of the dead.
When Hannah handed her the long slender match, inviting Dani to pay her respects, she accepted.
But Dani lit her candle, not as much in respect, as in a plea for forgiveness.
An apology for not thinking of Eddie every waking moment.
For letting everyone believe he died happy, when his last moments were spent in anguish.
Dani sat with the candle, watching the wax melt down the edges, waiting for something, a hint of change, maybe a release of emotion?
Something, anything, to calm her overwhelming anguish.
And as she sat, watching, Dani embraced the warmth of the candle.
The life of the dancing flame.
And for a brief moment, her reservations about grief didn’t matter.
Her worries about whether it was hers to have, whether it mattered, or where it belonged vanished as Hannah and Flora returned to the manor.
It was just Dani, her grief, and the crackle of a burning wick.
She couldn’t tell how long she sat there,
the only indicator of time she had was the candle,
burned halfway down its previous height.
And that was enough.
********
The second time Dani called upon Hannah’s ritual,
the very same evening as her first,
it became her own practice,
her own form of processing,
her own form of letting go.
The vision of Eddie had appeared again.
Once again tainting a moment with Jamie.
The turning point with Jamie.
Jamie had pressed her tender lips against Dani’s, with a passion and boldness Dani had never known, and she’d reciprocated.
She had briefly basked in the high of kissing a woman for the first time.
And not just any woman.
Jamie.
The gardener who’d taken so kindly to Dani, emotional baggage and all.
But then those familiar glowing eyes appeared once more.
Glaring from behind Jamie, into Dani’s eyes, seething with betrayal.
And removed her from the moment.
The moment of joy, acceptance, and newness stained by Eddie’s haunting face, and the closure Dani would never get.
And so, when she returned to her room that night, she knew she had to put Eddie behind her.
At least try and set him free.
Herself free.
And so, Dani found herself returning to the bonfire.
With his glasses.
Those damn glasses.
Throwing them in and watching them burn with every memory of Eddie flashing before her.
The first hello in grade school.
Meeting his family for the first time.
Eddie’s promposal senior year that had Dani convinced he’d propose any day.
Each and every pregnancy scare where he would drop everything to buy her a test before swearing to be more careful.
Their joint graduation party where the words Edmund and Danielle become synonymous amongst their friends.
Their first day of college and moving into the dorms, reassured that the other was just a floor away.
Their first apartment together their junior year of college and the fuss Eddie made about carrying her through the threshold.
Eddie’s proposal.
Every moment between the first timid wave and the last pleading look.
In the harsh flames of the bonfire, memories of Eddie danced around.
And as the memories began to fade, she saw herself again.
As Dani, not Danielle.
And at long last, both was free.
********
When Dani returned to the manor, she found herself searching for a spare box of candles.
Even one would suffice.
It felt wrong to leave him at the bonfire, to not give him the respect of an intimate goodbye.
She found a box in the back of a closet down the hall from the forbidden wing.
Leftovers from some grand romantic gesture in the past.
Dusted with the evidence of years gone by,
They had sat, perhaps for this moment.
She found matches in the bedside table.
Perhaps they had been one of Rebecca’s belongings,
perhaps they were another relic of the old estate.
Apt for burning away the past.
And so, Dani set to paying an appropriate homage to the man she had loved, her dearest friend, even after death.
She opened the window, and gently placed a candle on the sill.
Gingerly striking the match against its box, Dani took a deep breath before connecting the flame to the wick.
The first candle had felt false, like she was clinging to something that wasn’t hers to cling to, remembering Eddie on a day meant for another.
But in the comfort of her room, Dani could let herself grieve as she needed.
She could weep.
Be stoic.
Weep more.
There were no analyzing or prying eyes.
No judgement.
********
The candles sat untouched for weeks.
With Eddie gone,
His ghost set free,
Dani was content,
And the candles were forgotten.
Until the fateful night when the ghosts of Bly were set free.
Until the Lady of the Lake possessed her.
Until Hannah’s body was found.
In the immediate aftermath of the events at Bly that night, Henry had put the ragtag family up in a hotel, feeling that they shouldn’t be apart after the loss of Hannah and the near loss of Flora and Dani.
No one would return to the Manor for days.
But when they did, the first to return was Dani.
Everyone else had known Hannah.
Truly known her.
The living, breathing Hannah.
But Dani had only known a ghost.
The remains of memories and what Hannah had been.
The ghostly apparition that Dani had gotten to know couldn’t truly be considered Hannah.
And so, Dani was paralyzed.
Grieving someone she never truly met.
Someone she missed meeting by mere minutes and mere coincidence.
A kind soul gone,
one she’d never known.
One she’d never know.
All Dani could think about were the what ifs.
What if she had taken the car all the way to the manor that day?
What if she’d been able to begin her employment sooner?
Would any of this have happened had Dani simply done even one tiny little thing differently?
She felt as if she hadn’t said hello to someone in passing, just to find out later, that maybe those would’ve been the last words physically said to them.
And so, Dani found herself at the manor, alone.
She’d left Jamie back in town, with the family.
This was something she needed to do herself.
She found herself wandering the grounds, visiting the well where Hannah’s body had been discovered, the gardens where she first fell in love with Jamie, and lastly the chapel–Hannah’s refuge and final resting spot.
In the days since the family had vacated the manor, a light coating of dust had shed over the chapel.
Dani entered, half-expecting to see Hannah herself in there, only to be disappointed at the eerie emptiness that encompassed the chapel–it too seemed to be in mourning.
As she approached the newest ledgerstone, purposefully placed near the altar, Dani remembered the first time she visited Hannah’s refuge.
She remembered the kindness Hannah had shown her.
The invitation to a ritual so intimate and personal.
A ritual of remembrance.
A way to honor Hannah.
Her impact on Dani.
Even after death.
And so, Dani found herself lighting the candles adorning the altar.
Pausing after each to give each soul its respite.
Striking match after match, giving them the honor Hannah had given them.
And when, at last, the altar was aglow with the light of dozens of candles, Dani wept.
It felt as if Hannah were there.
A reminder that Hannah had been there.
Had walked in the same space.
Performed the same act.
Sought refuge and relief.
Paid her respects.
In both life, and death.
Nothing more,
Nothing less.