runtowardsomething | (no subject)

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."

Threaded | Flat

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.