runtowardsomething | (no subject)

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When Beverly first showed up here, she hadn't actually minded the Children's Home at all. If nothing else, it seemed a hell of a lot better than what she left behind, and at least she's had Eddie here with her, one little piece of a home that seems increasingly distant. Those reasons, at least, have held up. The staff here seems nice enough, and she has one of her best friends, and even some of the other kids here aren't totally awful. No one's been calling her name, anyway, her reputation as a slut firmly left behind her in Derry, as she would prefer it to stay. No, it's in other, stranger ways that her opinions on the place have started to change. Food goes bad before it's supposed to. The pipes clatter. She's seen some really gross-looking bugs, though she hasn't hesitated to just fucking stomp on them.

Perhaps worst of all, sometimes at night, when she's trying to sleep, she thinks she can hear an echo of a familiar voice whispering Bevvie, the ghost of a touch down her shoulder and arm to her waist, and then she jolts awake, gasping for air. She dismisses them as nightmares, at least in her own head, unwilling to talk about them to anyone else, but they don't feel like bad dreams. They feel real, only that's stupid, because he didn't follow her here and she knows it.

With the room otherwise empty for the time being, most of the other girls, a little older, out doing who knows what, Beverly has taken advantage of having a little time to herself, the window open a few inches so she can perch herself on the windowsill and smoke a cigarette without the teenage girls' bedroom reeking of it later. A part of her wonders if maybe she should go to Hopper's again, but she doesn't know what she would tell him. There's too much that she just can't talk about.

At the sound of someone coming into the room, she starts a little, drawing in a sharp breath and straightening her back. She relaxes almost immediately, though, when she realizes it's not one of the other caretakers but one of the other girls. "Hey," she says, a hint of a warm smile twitching at a corner of her mouth. "New kid, right?" There's nothing derogatory about it, nothing insulting. She's been here barely any time herself, though these days, she's itching to get out. Tapping ash out the window, she nods towards it and adds just slightly conspiratorially, "Don't tell on me."

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Adjusting to Darrow is going to take time. Cosette can, she's learned, get used to a great deal, but this isn't like moving from Rue Babylone to Rue de l'Ouest to Rue de l'Homme Armé and back again. Six weeks here, six weeks there — it's a strange life, but it was hers, and here she is in a home full of other girls she doesn't know, and it isn't right. She's trying hard to be brave, to keep her head up, but she's not sure she could say she's made friends quite yet. It hasn't been very long though. She has a distant memory of the convent and how it took time before she was ready to run and play with the other girls. Maybe this is just the same, an adjustment period.

The weather is still cold these days, but it hasn't stopped Cosette from prowling about the garden, as if getting to know a new friend. When she comes back in to warm herself and get a notebook, she isn't expecting to see anyone else. She stops just inside the doorway, considering the other girl. She's a stranger like all the others, with a name Cosette hasn't yet caught, and she speaks in that same American English that so many of the others speak, comprehensible by some mysterious God-given means and still unspeakably foreign. Her own voice, when she speaks, still rings with the accent of her homeland. She could, she has thought in bed at night, make more of an effort to pronounce things correctly, but she's stubborn. She's French, not American, and she's not trying to be anything else.

"I won't tell," she says, smiling a little as she heads further inside. It reminds her again of the convent and schoolgirl confidences, all the little things they hid from the nuns, the pleasures of an apple stolen from the garden secretly consumed in bed. "Yes, I'm new." None of it feels wholly real yet. "I'm Cosette." Most people here, she thinks, would have trouble pronouncing Euphraisie correctly anyway.

The promise of not being ratted out immediately puts Beverly a little more at ease. She's had some trouble here, she can't pretend otherwise, though she's mostly tried her best to hide it. There's no need for her to make herself look as out of place as she feels. Old habits are just hard to break, and back in Derry, before the Losers Club, there was no one she could turn to or count on, the other girls branding her a perpetual misfit and unrelenting in their cruelty. Going from home to school and then back every way was just an exchange of one hell for another. Here — well, strange happenings aside, it hasn't been a fraction as bad, but it makes it hard to put much trust in the other kids in the Home.

This is something, at least. She smiles for it, nodding to commit the name to memory, unfamiliar though it might be. "Cosette," she echoes, thinking that it doesn't have nearly the same lilt in her accent as it does in Cosette's own. That, though, is familiar — French, she'd guess, based on the length of her acquaintance now with Eponine, one of the few people here she might actually call a friend. Maybe it shouldn't seem strange. People come from all over, or so she's been told. What's really weird is the disproportionate number of Americans. "I'm Beverly. If it helps, I haven't really been here very long, either."

She's had long enough to get the lay of the land, so to speak, and to know that some of what she's seen lately is not normal for this place, but she still feels new. A lot of the others still look at her like she's knew, so it seems worth mentioning out of solidarity, or something of the sort. They're all of them stuck here, after all — both in Darrow itself and in the Home. It's not the sort of thing someone should have to feel alone with.

Would it be easier if she'd stayed at the convent, Cosette wonders, in those big rooms full of other girls? This place is so unlike the convent, and yet it reminds her so much of her schoolgirl days. And though she always flocked to Papa and Père Fauchelevent, how easily she played then. How she ran, how she laughed, with the other girls! But then had come the house in Rue Plumet and the weeks spent spirited away from Toussaint and the years of no one but her maid and her father. Has she, then, lost her conversational graces? It was so easy at the convent. Why is it that now she feels so shy?

She steps further into the room, glancing behind her as if one of the workers here might turn up in the doorway and catch Beverly smoking. But there's no one, just the two of them.

"Beverly," she echoes, an unconscious mimicry of Beverly herself with her own name, though Beverly's name becomes something different in her voice, something that ends soft and high. She almost feels guilty for it. She doesn't really like how Cosette sounds in the American accent; it's too unfamiliar, somehow lonely, not her name at all. She imagines they'd have even worse of a time trying to pronounce Euphrasie. "How long have you been there then?"

"Since December," Beverly answers, trying to do the math to determine exactly how long it's been and quickly giving up. It isn't as if it matters. She's adapted well enough, but she still feels new, and anyway, she's glad to be anywhere that isn't home. She was, at least, until recently. Things have changed lately, or they've felt like they have, and it's hard to be sure just how much of that is in her head. She just has to remind herself that if it was real before, then it could be real again now, and there is, in fact, no reason to believe that it isn't except that she'd almost rather it be in her head than anything else. It's hard to pinpoint what's going on or what it reminds her of; she just knows that she doesn't like it.

There's no reason to alarm Cosette, though, and she doesn't know what she would have to say about any of it in the first place. Better just to let it be.

"There're a few of us who haven't been here long, even if it seems like most of them have." Perpetually out of place again, just like she was in Derry. It isn't so bad, though. She has Eddie, and she's away from her father. That's enough.

Cosette has to remind herself that December wasn't that long ago. In moving forward in time by so many years, she's also slipped back a month, which she supposes oughtn't to be the most confusing part of it, but it sometimes seems it is. Everything else is so strange that she's hardly begun to wrap her mind around it, from the wonders of electricity to a world of unfamiliar foods to the very fact of cars. The world is not so quiet as once it was behind her garden gate.

"I am still trying to learn who everyone is," she admits. "So many names and faces — I don't know where to begin. This place is so strange."

It's only been a handful of days, though. Cosette refuses to despair. She'll figure it out, all the other girls in the house, all the boys here, too. She'll learn everyone before too long, too determined to do otherwise. She tells herself it's a chance, an adventure; for too long, she's only been able to write to friends. Now, perhaps, she can make new ones. Certainly she shouldn't try to take this place on too much alone.

"It's definitely that," Beverly agrees, her smile a little tight. As far as she can tell, it started strange and has only gotten stranger, which is saying kind of a lot. Even if it weren't for that, though, it would be a difficult adjustment. Most of the people here are from here, they already know each other and are from here, and it doesn't always seem to be easy for them to let other people into the fold. It's still a big step up from home, at least for her, but that's also not saying very much. Some of the time, she can get by easily enough. Other times, the nearly two decades that separate her from this place have a significant effect on how she manages to get by. Cosette obviously comes from a place that isn't at all like this one, and Beverly doesn't know what kind of time difference she might be working with. Regardless, it's not exactly an easy transition. No wonder Cosette isn't sure where to start.

She was lucky, when she showed up, having Eddie here. Maybe she can be that for someone else, in some capacity.

"Well, if you need help with any of it," she says, "I'd be glad to try to do what I can, or whatever."

It's a kind offer and Cosette smiles in return, pleased. Maybe Beverly only means to be nice but won't actually be much help; the intention is still there, and she's been so grateful to everyone who's tried to help so far. It's been a difficult adjustment, but she's determined to work through it. Papa would be so worried for her right now, but, she hopes, he'd be proud of her, too, and her spirit and resourcefulness.

"Thank you," she says. "I have so many questions and I don't know who to ask. Everything here is... new." Some of the other girls saw her arrive in her old-fashioned dress, the one she'd thought very fetching when she bought it not so many months ago, and she knows they laughed and whispered. Beverly wasn't one of them, though, or she likely wasn't. She may not know that Cosette is from a time long before even the grandmothers of the other children here. "I am trying to understand it all myself, but it is so much."

"You don't know anyone else here, do you?" Beverly asks, torn between being a little grateful for her own sake and a little regretful for Cosette's. Eddie hadn't been much when it came to explaining any of this, too easily worked up and freaked out, but at least she'd had a friend to lean on in those early days when she needed it most, someone who understood when and where she came from, if not all of what she left behind. She still hasn't told anyone else that, though these days, it feels like it's haunting her more than ever, a tangible presence in her life. Sometimes it seems like someone could take one look at her and know, though she's sure that's ridiculous.

Either way, it's nothing worth burdening someone she's only just met, least of all when Cosette has so much to deal with already. "I mean, it's a lot either way, but..." Trailing off, she shrugs, figuring there's no sense in saying anything more to that end. "Any questions are probably a good place to start, though. Not all of 'em will have answers around here, but it's still something."

Cosette hesitates, and then shakes her head, small but emphatic. "No, I am entirely alone," she says, her chin lifting as she speaks, refusing to be cowed by that fact. It's terrifying, being in this strange new place without anyone to help her or call her friend, but she can survive this. She won't entertain any other option. Someday she'll return to Paris, and in the meanwhile, this is an adventure she's having. That's all there is to it. She's frightened, but she's not about to say so.

"Have you tried to leave yet?" she asks after a moment. "Everyone says you cannot." They say the road turns upon itself, so that the city becomes some impossible circle, a labyrinth without escape. She hasn't yet made it to the edge of the city to try for herself, but perhaps Beverly can confirm it.

Beverly wants to apologize for the fact of that, knowing full well just how lucky she's been, but bites it back. A statement like that could easily go over poorly, and with as few friends as she has here and as fucked as everything has been lately, she would rather not drive away, at the very least, a new acquaintance. She'll just make sure that it doesn't have to stay that way, if she can. Without Eddie, she'd have had a much harder time with all of this. The least she can do is try to help someone else newly arrived.

"I haven't," she admits, though she bites back what follows. She misses Bill and Ben and the others so much it hurts sometimes, but she was leaving anyway. Whatever is happening in the Home is fucked, but so was home. With that being the case, she might as well stay where she is. "I guess I just took everyone's word for it. There's got to be someone who's actually tried it, though."

Had Beverly said she'd tried it and failed, Cosette would have taken her at her word and let it go. She has no reason, after all, to believe Beverly is speaking anything but truth to her; what cause would she have to doubt? And that would have sufficed. But she hasn't, and so, Cosette finds, she remains unsatisfied. Something has to be done, after all, about this. She doesn't know that the people who told her of this have tried either. They, too, might be taking someone else at their word. It might all be a misunderstanding. She doubts it very much, but there's a possibility, and where there is a glimmer of hope, it must be grasped until it can be held no longer.

"Then I should like to try it," she says decisively. "It is the far end of the city, no? Out past the graveyard?" The only other option is the ocean, which Cosette is very excited to see as well, but she's not going to try to swim into the ocean until she can't anymore. Even if she could swim, she would not attempt such foolishness. She must go by land.

"Yeah, apparently you just have to keep walking out that way," Beverly says, nodding. "And eventually you just wind up doubling back without realizing it." It's strange, but strange is par for the course around here, and although maybe it should, it doesn't strike her as inherently sinister the same way some things back home did. What's happening in the Home may be a different story, but that isn't, as far as she can tell, all over the city. It's just here, and she doesn't want to scare Cosette when she's so recently arrived by going into detail about all of it.

Instead, smiling crookedly, she adds on a whim, "If you want to see sometime, I'd go with you." She has no real desire to leave Darrow, no matter how much she might miss Bill and Ben and some of the others — she'd been about to move away anyway — but that doesn't mean she has any desire to return. (If It came back, then she would in a second; her memory might be hazy sometimes, but the scar that bisects her palm is a permanent reminder of the promise she made.) "I haven't really been out that way, it might be worth taking a look."

Cosette nods. She's just been out in the garden exploring and tending to the flowers with Madame Velazquez, but she's tempted to suggest going now, her curiosity insatiable. She just wants, more than anything else, to go home. This might not get her there, but at least she'd know she tried.

"I would like that," she says instead. Company might help. They could set about it cautiously, scientifically, together, like an experiment. "Tomorrow maybe? Or this weekend, I suppose, when there is no school." She makes a slight face at that, not meaning to. She has to go back to school, and she's torn on the matter. She sees no need for her to return to classes, but she has to admit, it might be nice to learn more again instead of always reading the same old books they had in the house.

"Weekend's probably easier," Beverly says, making a face in turn. School here isn't the sort of hellscape it was in Derry, at least, but that doesn't mean she likes it. She's never really fit in, and Darrow is no exception. Then again, any time she spends in school is time she isn't in the Home, and she's been trying to spend as much time out as she can lately. Something isn't right here; she can feel it, has become increasingly aware of it, though she still doesn't want to scare the new girl by commenting on it. Besides, to do so, she would probably have to talk about things that she doesn't like talking about, not even with people she's close to. If Cosette asks, she'll tell her, but otherwise, Beverly figures it's probably better left unspoken. "As much as I wish it weren't. Are you starting classes yet?"

"Soon," Cosette says. "Next week. I have to take some tests first to see what grade I should be in." That part makes her uncomfortable, the idea of being judged by the standards of this place. She's very well educated by the standards of her day, especially for a young lady, and it seems silly to think that she might not be considered up to par here. On top of that, she finished her studies three years ago. She doesn't want to go to school with children three years younger than her to catch up, to be always behind the rest.

"I haven't been to school in a while. It is true the boys and girls go to the same school?"

"It is, yeah," Beverly says, nodding. "You know, for better or worse." She never really stopped to think about it, but it's hard not to wonder how much different things might have been if she'd gone to an all-girls school back home. Granted, she would probably have had to live somewhere else entirely — Derry wasn't big enough for that — and she might never have met the boys who became her family. She also might not have put up with years of torment and name-calling, being branded a slut so early on and never having a way to counter it. Rumors spread. Children's minds are difficult to change. "Well, I'm in 8th now, and starting high school in the fall, so depending on where you are, if you need someone to show you the ropes..."

Cosette nods. "I would like that, thank you," she says. She has a lot to learn if she's to go to school here. As frustrating as it is to be reevaluated by these new standards and to risk being surrounded by children, she has to admit, there's something exciting about it, too, going back to school. There is much to learn, and if the girls and boys go to school together, she will be allowed to learn all that the boys are taught. She has no complaints about the education she received, but at home, she's often had little to read but books she's already read and magazines she ordered about fashion. It might be nice to branch out.

"What is 8th please?"

"Oh! 8th is 8th grade," Beverly explains. "School is kind of... divided into three parts? Elementary school, middle school, and high school. Elementary is 1st grade through 5th, which is roughly 6-year-olds to 10-year-olds, middle is 6th through 8th, so 11-year-olds to 13-year-olds, and high school is 9th through 12th." She doesn't know what school was like when and where Cosette is from, making it hard to know what to add beyond that, but it's something. Anything else, she can probably just answer as needed. As it is, she's used to being from before most of the people here, not bringing someone else up to speed. It's all the more reason to want to help, but it's kind of an adjustment not to take some knowledge for granted.

Cosette nods thoughtfully, taking that in. "So I will be in high school," she says. "When I left school, I would have been in 8th." But this is a different world. As daunting as the idea of going back to school might be, part of her is still excited for the chance to learn more. She was a good student at the convent, and she'd like to think she can be again here.

"We'll only be a year apart, then," Beverly says, then smiles. At least for her, it's made a big difference, knowing at least a couple of people, even if it's only in passing. For that matter, she doesn't know what she would have done if she hadn't had Eddie in school with her. It seems to be common around here, she thinks, the sense that people who are from other places ought to stick together, and Cosette seems nice, someone she could maybe be friends with. "It's one nice thing about living in the Home, already having met some people."

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