Who: Clara What: Narrative Where: Out When: Today Warnings: None
“But why did ya do it?” Clara asked the man who, admittedly, wasn’t really paying attention to her. His eyes were wander wide, and he kept scanning the alley - back and forth and back and forth. “You’d been on that kind of mission a whole mess of times before, what made that one different than the rest?” she asked, leaning forward, elbows on the long, white linen day dress she wore, the hem trailing in the dirt as she crouched in front of the homeless man.
She knew him, the man, recognized him from Musings. She’d known he was gonna cross, too, she just hadn’t a said a thing to a soul about it. He’d come into the lab as normal as a ray of sunshine, and the last time she’d seen him he was mad as a hatter. His name was Earl, if memory served, but her memory wasn’t always a sure thing. So he was Earl now, regardless, because he sure wasn’t telling her otherwise. And now he was here, dirty and cold and he wouldn’t answer a thing, and she felt that old pang of things she’d done real wrong.
She’d only been through the portal herself a little over a month, and she’d only been out of the hospital for a few days, but she was restless, and restless almost always meant trouble where she was concerned. It just seemed silly, sitting in that big ol’ apartment all by her lonesome, doing a whole lot of nothing with time ticking in her hourglass. And so she’d gone wandering.
Seattle, she’d already decided, was something come straight from a nightmare.
She pulled some money out of her white boot, and she tucked it in Earl’s coat pocket. Given the smell of him, she was pretty sure it would go straight to drink, but who was she to judge? She wasn’t such a naive thing that she thought everything living could be saved. Earl, all alone like he was, wouldn’t make it, no matter how much money she put in his pocket. Some folks, they just needed caring for, and Earl was one of that sort. Mind gone putty from seeing too many terrible things. He was the kind of man people pretended they didn’t see on the street corner, and she stood and looked down at him. “What are we gonna do now that I found you?” she asked him, not expecting any response.
She couldn’t very well take him home. Home, where that big ol’ apartment sat empty, except for her bedroom and the sitting room and bathroom that connected to it. Even the kitchen was lacking in furniture, because it was too much space for her, and she took her meals in the sitting room anyway. It hardly seemed necessary, adding all that clutter. But she wasn’t naive enough to take him home, either.
“You just sit a spell,” she told him, as if he was perfectly sane, and she wandered back out to the road, looking one way and the other before crossing.
The walk to the private animal shelter was a short one, and she shook the snow off her blonde hair as she went inside and approached the tired looking woman behind the counter. The place was a mess, falling down around the woman’s ears, and Clara smiled at her like she was an angel come down from Heaven to save her from it. “I got a business proposition,” she told the woman, and it took her a good thirty minutes of conversing to get the woman thinking she was talking serious.
By the time she wandered back to Aubade, her hem was filthy, and she had less money than she’s started with by six digits, but Earl was settling in real fine in the kitten room, and the woman at the shelter was planning improvements. It wasn’t mental health care, but Clara knew some folks were just mad, just that way for permanent and not a thing to to be done about. Earl’d always liked her kitten, the one she’d kept in the lab, and he was a harmless sort of man, even with the drinking.
Maybe, she reckoned, it was time to get working again.