this is a place where i don't feel alone.

Detour a few thousands miles that way, and we'd make it to Blackpool.

[Clara drapes over the railing, finger pointing out to the horizon. The ferry, puttering through the southern half of Chesapeake Bay, grunts and grumbles in protest. It's barely cut out to make it between Newport News and Smith Island, much less take them home to England.]

Can't believe I still haven't gotten over there.

[When Cosima arrives home, it's to the smell of cookies. This can only mean two things - either sweet Mrs. Emmerdale next door brought over dessert, or Clara's baking.

Certain disaster.]

Cos', that you?

[Clara's slightly panicked voice comes from the kitchen, where she seems to be trying very hard to conceal a baking sheet behind her back.]

Wait.

[Clara looks up from the pavement, her leather glove pulled halfway off her fingers. The cover of night isn't enough to hide the bewildered amusement on her face.]

Did you break up during the bowling, or after?

[Technically, she's not supposed to be here. Nonah PD already has jurisdiction, and murder doesn't really fall under her investigative license. But she saw Sarissa's face in the alleyway, and it's been far too long since their last chat.

Even if it's taking place over a puddle of a small-time gangster's blood, while she scans the scene with her glasses.]

Look, last time you saw me I was being straddled by a bank robber. This can't be much stranger.

[Clara barely turns her head as she speaks, watching Peter approach out the corner of her eye. She's perched on a low wall in De Chima's central park, surreptitiously trying to take cell phone pictures of a man some yards away.

Sometimes her day job feels more like professional stalking.]

Well, that's hardly a detour at all.

[ He smiles as he joins her at the railing, following her gaze to the horizon. It really is the furthest outside of the porter cities he’s been since arriving. He isn’t one for adventure, and she knows that, but a short trip like this is right up his alley. ]

Why haven’t you, then? It's still home, isn't it?

[She shrugs. In big sunglasses and jeans, of all things, she looks almost like a normal tourist.]

Not if the people aren't there. And they were always here.

After. While after.

( Sarissa's crouching down beside a dumpster, looking at the brick wall, and some paint chips on it, frowning as she makes notes. ) I asked her which whale emoji she liked better, we went out for lunch. I'd say Jess walked in there determined to break up with me and not talk about it, but I think she started dating me determined to break up with me and not talk about it.

( She is trying to make light of t, while still being salty. She's not sure that's the healthiest way to deal, but Jess isn't a villain, she ain't either. They're just humans. )

Maybe she- oh, oh, this is definitely cocaine. [She waves Sarissa over to where the victim's shoe is still sitting abandoned.] Maybe she isn't good at relationships. Maybe she really cares about you, but didn't know how to do this.

Oh, nice. That'll help us pull an all-nighter. ( Dry and typically Sarissaly off-hand. She's still collecting the paint chips carefully, then frowns, and moves to the victim, carefully leaning it to inspect his hand. ) Paint on the wall might be a match for the stuff under his nails. Colour looks close.

( And, back on topic, or back off-topic depending how you look at it: ) I know she cares, and I know she's complicated. And I told her I was okay with complicated and helping her figure shit out, but I'm not gonna beg someone to keep dating me if they want to bolt every five minutes. Seems shitty for both of us.

If you don't mind snorting some blood.

[The word "snort" sounds hilariously wrong in her voice. She joins Sarissa near the wall, glasses buzzing.]

... I'm sorry about Jess. You deserved something good.

( Clara says "snort," and Sarissa has to make an effort not to snort in a more comical sense. )

Oh, with blood? Nah, save it for a special occasion, then.

( And, looking at the glasses, ) You need big dangly earrings to go with that. It's just like your undercommitting to the eighties, otherwise.

( She doesn't immediately seem like she's gonna reply to the other point, but: ) Jess ain't bad. And what we have— had, that wasn't bad either. It was good, I just— I'm trying to be healthier. And that didn't seem like it'd be healthy, if it kept up. You know?

[The woods outside of Nonah are not a completely foreign place to Clara. She's visited her own sisters-in-law regularly enough that even the remote roads of the forested foothills have started to make sense to her city-trained mind.

At night, though, it's a different story.]

Dammit.

[It's past midnight by now, and she's starting to think that the werewolf sightings she heard about in town are complete rubbish. The only frightening thing she's encountered on this trip was a man peeing in a creek. But it's been twenty minutes since her phone lost its signal, and even with enhanced senses she can't seem to find her way back to the road. Clara is truly and fully lost in the woods, and she hasn't even found a monster to justify the trip.

At least, not yet.]

I've been to the eighties. They weren't worth committing to.

[For one thing, she was trapped in a submarine and the world almost ended.]

And I do know, unfortunately. [Her glasses ping, and she adjusts them to read the screen better.] Least you weren't so bad for each other that she had to erase her memory of you.

Fair point.

[ He shrugs in agreement, but his life was always so quiet in London. He has no family waiting for him back home, few friends, he can’t really know how that feels. ]

I think I’d still like to take a trip over. Just once. It might be worth it to see if the food tastes any different.

I wouldn't say that too loudly. Rumour mill being what it is with ImPorts, suddenly it'll be that you wiped Cosima's memory of something and you also were dating someone else, and how do you deny rumours of tampering with someone's memory?

( A beat; maybe that's a problem for Sarissa more than Clara, actually, powers considered. )

That actually happen, or are you bein' dramatic and British? One cannot be one-upped, wot wot. And I'm not gonna forgive you for not praisin' Kylie, you savage.

Cos' and I would read the tabloids together and laugh, like we already do now.

[ImPort weddings are rare enough that theirs got an excess of curious press. One news rag claimed that they were only marrying due to an illegitimate alien child, which the couple thoroughly enjoyed reading over tea.]

And it really happened, I'm afraid. The Doctor and I nearly broke the universe trying to stay together, so one of us had to go.

Shit.

( Tabloids forgotten, tbh. Sarissa just pauses for a moment, weighing that up, pausing in her note taking. )

You remember, I take it?

Every second.

[She pushes the glasses up, and leans in to examine a bit of chipped brick.]

I guess Cos' is the healthiest relationship I've had.

Better to remember than forget. Forgetting just carves away pieces of who you became.

( Sarissa pushes herself up to stand, and offers a hand to Clara. ) Not a bad bar that you've set, mind. My healthiest—

( Huh. ) "Healthy before it went to shit" probably ain't healthy, but I'm still figuring out why stuff went to shit, so I'll keep you posted.

[Okay, Ruby usually just avoids people when she goes out for one of her runs in this form, both for her own safety and to avoid scaring the pants off of anybody. It's not like it's particularly hard to do so with her acute hearing and smell, but, strangely enough, there's something familiar that she can't quite place about one of the scents she's picked up tonight, and given the hour and just how deep she is in the forest right now, curiosity and concern have pushed her to attempt to investigate.

From a distance for now, sure, but that might almost make it worse when Clara realizes there is something very large now slowly stalking her through the woods, stealthy enough that anyone without her enhanced senses wouldn't notice it was there at all.]

Edited 2017-09-21 14:36 (UTC)

I'm going to forget one day, anyway. Human brains aren't meant to hold an immortal lifespan of memories.

[First world problems, you know. She takes the offered hand, standing up next to Sarissa. Her eyes scan the alleyway again.]

Maybe we shouldn't be having this talk over a dead gangster.

The tea here is terrible. I'd take the flight just for that.

[Clara isn't too concerned with the food - she would live off of toast and biscuits if she had to - but the tea is a crying shame.]

Cos' and I talked about going. She showed me California, where she's from, so it was only fair. I'm sure we could take you with us.

[She's just about to turn around when she hears it - the press of a foot against early autumn leaves, the low rumble of an exhale.

Something is behind her.]

H-Hello?

[Clara's voice comes out very small, and she hates the sound of it. She's a space traveler, for goodness' sake. She's been in much more frightening situations than this. But there's something about the banality of it, of being followed through woods by an unseen animal, that chills her bones more than anything she's faced on a distant planet.]

[Honestly, Clara had the escape worked out perfectly. Trip the silent alarm, dive out the window, disappear into smoke before anyone could see her. Police would be at the scene in two minutes, and the gun runners would have no warning to hide their stock.

Of course, this all counted on her foot not catching on the window sill, and - of course - that is precisely what happens. The toe of her boot snags, and she flips right into the brick wall, striking her head before plummeting the rest of the way down.

It's only a twelve foot fall, but it's a twelve foot fall right onto a passerby, and she makes it with absolute precision.]

[The sound pauses at her question.

Crap, she did NOT mean to be noticed there. But more importantly... is that Clara? Any other day Ruby would just change back to her human form and walk right up, but during the full moon?? Without her cloak, which is hidden in the crook of a tree a few miles back toward Granny's, the magic of wolfstime has her stuck in this shape until morning.

So that's helpful.

After briefly considering the other option (leaving and crossing her paws that Clara isn't as lost as she suspects), Ruby slowly begins to approach again, trying to figure out how to communicate at all right now. The best she can think of for now is to keep a low, non-aggressive posture and make a quiet whining sound she hopes will help balance out her enormous size on the intimidation scale.]

this is a place where i don't feel alone.

for danny.

for cosima.

for sarissa.

for peter.

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for ruby.

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for jesse.

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