River Tam (withmybrain) wrote in parabolical, @ 2008-07-26 21:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | peter petrelli (future), river tam |
who| River Tam and Peter Petrelli (future)
what| There are few things stranger than strangers.
where| The streets; LA.
when| Night; Relatively late.
rating| TBA; PG-13 for smidgeons of violence.
status| thread; in-progress
That was the problem, River had found. She could keep her head down and mouth shut, sleep on the little cot the strangers with bare hands gave her, and make believe she didn't exist in all these places That Were. It wasn't getting better, and it wasn't moving foward, but it was hard, and it made her remember she existed. Existing was dangerous, but even worse was what she might become if she forgot.
But eventually the food wouldn't stay down, and her mouth would force itself open and say things for reasons that weren't really reasons, though it felt like there were ones. Her head had become a noisy place. The voices didn't come from bodies, which didn't give her anything to hide behind.
And she could have used something to hide behind. It had been a particularly bad night. The nightmares had sent her screaming back into conciousness so many times that the other waywards had begun sending whispers between themselves that she wasn't safe, that she was troubled, that she should be Somewhere that Someone could Take Care of Her. River had retreated to the corner of the dorm where people sometimes left things large enough to sit behind. The top of her head could still be seen, from a few angles, and it bobbed and shook as she molded her screams into mutters, and listened for signs of a danger that was real.
She hoped it wouldn't, even though she thought it wound, and like alot of things that River thought, no matter how skewed, it came.
He was limping past the other unsettled squatters with purpose, and his purpose was to rat the little rat having a headcase close to his cot out to the first facility he could find in the phone book. He was still trying to remember how to spell 'Psychiatric' when she hit him with his own crutch. His head made a nasty noise on the floor. It matched his smell, and attitude. Jayne had at least showered before he'd tried to turn her in. People were stirring. River put the crutch through the window next to the table with the telephone, and jumped down into the alleyway below. Brushing bits of broken glass from the striped socks on her feet, she stooped to take something from the ground. Several city blocks were behind her before she paused to untangle the buckles behind her neck, and re-shod her feet.
Things were bumping in the night; River could hear them on the edges of her ears, and they weren't far off. No direction took hold of her soles, so she chose one for herself, dragging her rucksack along behind her. It wasn't long until she had stepped on something. The ground crackled beneath her boots, turning her toes the way They wanted her to go. Things jumped out at her from the shuttered shop windows, but none of them were hers, and she passed through them.
Something squished beneath her foot. She moved it to the side, and watched it, hard. The protien bar became a hand, became an arm, became a branch, became a body. A hand that was a hand from the first moment clamped down on her shoulder, and River had popped the arm that remained an arm out of it's socket before she had turned completely around. It was a mess of hands and strange faces made stranger by wrinkles and blood, but when the screaming stopped, River sneezed on the dust, and handed the piece of glass she had been told to take from the remains of the shelter window to the protien bar on the ground.