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Tell Me Your Story

by perrienova on ao3 (i didn't change anything on this story)

Summary: Jade reads to headstones, and Perrie can't help but be enamored by the first visitor in years.

A short and sweet ghost story.

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Jade loved to drive. She liked to take the backroads and explore, listen to music, and just relax. Driving always took her mind off things. It was so automatic, but took just enough focus that none of her problems seemed able to infiltrate her brain. She was driving the backroads when she found it.

The road leading up to it was cracked and full of potholes, the parking area a dirt clearing. The front gate was hanging off its hinges, a decrepit sign telling her "No Trespassing. Open Sunrise to Sunset. Gold Hill Cemetery." Jade felt a longing, a yearning towards this place. She was overwhelmingly compelled to explore.

Slipping through the half-fallen gate, Jade looked around her. The majority of the headstones were covered in moss, fences rusted, tree roots pushing many headstones to be crooked. There were fallen tree branches from the stormy winter preceding that spring, some grave markers wooden and rotting. The flowers that were placed at a few headstones were long dead and wilted away. The place was beautiful, and Jade was enamored.

Jade began searching through the headstones to find the oldest one there. To find the youngest. To find the oldest. To find the one most taken over by the surrounding nature. She came across many from the 1910s and 20s, lives lost clearly to war and influenza. There was a headstone marking the grave of a three month old baby. Jade teared up. This poor baby has been alone for so long.

Jade slipped back out the gate and unlocked her car, grabbing a book from the front seat. "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos." It wasn't quite suited for a baby, but it was the only book she had. She sat herself in front of the little baby's small headstone, working to make out the name underneath the moss and weathering. Jonah? Joshua? Something that started with a J and had an A towards the end. She figured it didn't matter. Despite being halfway through the book, Jade started from the beginning.

"The painting is stolen the same week the Russians put a dog into space...."

From behind a tree nearby, Perrie listened carefully to the story of the painting.

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Jade went back later that week, unable to get the headstone of the baby out of her mind. It broke her heart. She returned with a book much more suited to the baby's age, borrowed from her nephews. Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes. She sang some, read others she didn't know the tune to. She read until the sun began to set and she could no longer make out the words.

"I'm so sorry this happened to you, little one," she said, after a long pause in her reading. "You deserved a long and happy life. But I hope I can be a small comfort after a long time spent alone."

She didn't know what it was compelling her to speak, to read, to keep coming back. But Jade couldn't help herself.

A week later she returned to continue the story of "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos." She figured it must have been annoying to anyone else listening that she left off part way through.

The relief Perrie felt upon seeing this girl again was unspeakable. She's been alone for so long, the comfort of her voice and the stories was insurmountable. Perrie sat atop a headstone next to sweet little Joshua's, swinging her legs back and forth as she listened to the story. Her feet bumped against the cement headstone.

Jade's head snapped to the side, hearing a bumping noise. Nothing. There was nothing there. Shrugging it off, she continued reading.

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