complexfemalecharacter | (no subject)

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alex

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Four days in and it's still all pretty fucked.

Maeve is used to having her own place, somewhere she can go to when she needs to escape the rest of the world, which happens a lot more often than she would admit to out loud. The caravan wasn't much, but it was hers and she'd been able to keep it clean and decorate it the way she wanted. No one else made any noise, she could play whatever music she liked, and maybe her neighbours fought too much, but she'd take Cynthia over a bunch of kids any day.

Right now she's just trying to spend as little time there as possible. They're looking into getting her into school, even though it's close to the end of the year. Maeve wants to get back, she needs to get back, because there's no way in hell she's losing three months and having to spend a whole extra year trying to get her diploma so she can do something more. This should be her last bloody year, she's meant to be graduating, but now time has gotten all fucked up along with dimensions and it's like she's back a year.

But she's not back in school yet and so now, in the middle of the day, she's just out. She's got a shitty and too sweet iced coffee in one hand and she's wearing some clothes one of the workers at the Home had given to her, but the jeans are too big and the shirt is too tight, so she's standing in front of a thrift shop, looking at the offerings through the window.

Tugging at the waist of the jeans, pulling them up higher only for them to slide down and settle on her hips again, Maeve figures it's her best bet. Not like she can afford anything else right now anyway.

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Alex worked a closing shift left night and she's wearing the marks of it - one of Darlington's sweatshirts pulled on over her jeans and her combat boots, her shades firmly in place. She watches the fork for a long minute, her coffee paused on the way to her mouth.

"That place doesn't have a great selection," she says. "They put all the decent shit in the window."

At the sound of a voice, Maeve shifts her gaze from the window, finding a young woman speaking to her and then she looks back at the clothes on display. Her shoulders lift in a shrug inside her leather jacket -- and it's a relief she at least carried this and her combat boots and jewelry into Darrow with her -- and she lets out a sigh.

"Know of any better places?" she asks. "Pretty sure the Home isn't going to give me enough allowance to head straight into the mall for a whole new wardrobe."

And she doesn't need a lot. Just some basics. Just something other than the ill-fitting shit she's wearing now.

"There's a much better place a couple of blocks away," says Alex, gesturing with a nod off her head. "C'Mon. I'll walk with you."

Alex has been great at thrift stores since she left home. Until she came to Darrow, she'd never really had many new things, except ones that came off sale racks at Target. There's a lot in this girl's face that she recognises.

Maeve hesitates, because she doesn't know who this person is. So far no one in Darrow seems to be a serial killer or like they're going to make her life hell in some other way, but that doesn't mean she's not going to come across it eventually. The only way she's gotten as far as she has is through not trusting anyone.

But she needs proper clothes. And a few blocks away in broad daylight is probably fine.

"You do this a lot?" she asks, falling in step. "Help random riffraff on the street?"

"More than you'd think," says Alex, grinning, as they fall into step with each other, two pairs of combat boots against the sidewalk. "Probably a side effect of being random riffraff for a lot of my life. I'm Alex."

"Maeve," she answers, casting a sidelong glance at Alex. She doesn't exactly look like riffraff, not by Maeve's standards, but her clothes are cool and she gives off a kind of vibe that Maeve figures means she's legit when it comes to finding the right place for a thrift shop.

"I like your glasses," she offers. "Your whole look, really. Better than the shit they gave me at the Home to try and deal with until I can get my own clothes."

She has her boots and her jacket and all her jewelry. At least she hadn't arrived without any of her armour.

"You ended up there? That's shitty." Alex can't imagine what would have happened if she'd arrived here younger than eighteen. Something would have ended up burned to the ground.

"Friend of mine was there for a while. How old are you?"

"Seventeen," Maeve says. "Not for much longer, but long enough."

Time is a little bit of a mess here, but at least she knows she's only going to be stuck in that Home for the next four and a half months. It's not ideal, she'd rather be on her own now. She knows she could get into all the work necessary to prove it, go through the courts, fill out the proper paperwork and probably end up in her own place before the four and a half months are up. The option exists, she's just not sure it's worth the effort. She doesn't know how much time she would actually shave off those months and she needs to be focusing on her grades.

As soon as she gets back into class.

"I wouldn't go back to being seventeen again if you paid me," says Alex, corner of her mouth tugging up in a wry smile. Seventeen had been when she'd started hitting any substance that she can find, anything to drown out the hum of grays.

Maeve gives a shrug, lifting one shoulder higher than the other, and keeps her eyes ahead. It isn't as if seventeen has been any worse than the sixteen years before it. If she considers Aimee and Otis, it's actually been better than the years before, even with the rough parts.

Mostly she's not thinking about Erin or Elsie.

"Not sure being eighteen fixes all the things people hate about being seventeen," she points out.

Alex laughs at that, a wry smile and shakes her head, blunt ends of her straight, dark hair slipping over her shoulders. "You've got a good point," she says, hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket. "Twenty-two is the best age I've ever been."

Maeve figures every age will be more or less the same for her, once she's gotten out of the Home and is on her own. It's not like she has a lot of optimism for the future, it's just going to be whatever it is, and she'll do her best to make sure it's a good future but no one really has that much control over where they end up.

"Right now I'm just hoping to get back to school so I can graduate," she admits.

"They're helping you with that, right?" says Alex, who wishes, looking back, that she'd given a shit about finishing high school when she was Maeve's age. She'd ended up at Yale anyway, but that hadn't exactly gotten her anywhere, had it? "At the home?"

"They are," Maeve says with a nod. "I think I'm supposed to start week after next, but I guess they're not sure which school I'll be going to yet."

She doesn't really care, so long as she can get into some of the more advanced classes. If she's going to be stuck here, she isn't going to waste her time.

"My boyfriend keeps trying to talk me into going back to college," says Alex, looking down at her boots as she walks. "But I don't know how I feel about that yet."

Maeve can't wait to get into college. The classes have to be more interesting than most of what's offered in secondary school, the professors have to be at least slightly less obnoxious, and she has a feeling, too, that whatever reputation she's carried for the past four years won't follow her there.

But she knows it isn't for everyone.

"You should only go if you want to," she says. "Not because your boyfriend wants you to. But I figure you know that."

"Yeah, I do," says Alex, nodding. Probably the only person who knows that better than Alex is Danny Arlington himself. Still, it doesn't stop him wanting better for her. she guesses he'll always want that. "I'm just...kind of enjoying being here, at the moment. Finding my feet. None of the shit at home following me." Alex's eyes dart, for a moment, following the path of a gray who crosses her path. "Most of it, anyway."

Maeve follows Alex's gaze, but she doesn't see anything, so she only arches an eyebrow curiously and says nothing. People all have their own shit, she knows that as well as anyone, and she doesn't see any reason to pry.

"So is this the place?" she asks as they get close to another thrift shop.

"Yeah, this is it," says Alex, pushing open the door and holding it open so that Maeve can step into the shop ahead of her. "I got this jacket here when I first arrived. These boots too." She pushes her shades up onto the top of her head. "I...didn't get to bring much with me."

"I bought my uniform for the quiz team I was part of back home," Maeve says. "Khakis and yellow button down and a burgundy bow tie, which really isn't my style."

She steps into the shop and begins to pick through the racks, relieved to discover she'll be able to find something here.

"Thanks," she says, looking at Alex. "This is great."

"I was...very naked," she says, smirking. "Thankfully, I turned up in my apartment, not on the street, right?" Alex starts leafing through the rows. She wears a lot of Darlington's stuff these days, but she still wants stuff of her own. She's also in the market for something new for the club.

Maeve wonders how that works, how it's decided who gets to show up where. She would have liked to have not shown up in a shop, her face streaked with tears, but it isn't as if anyone asked what she preferred when she was pulled out of her admittedly messy life.

"Sounds like a rough landing," she says as she pulls out a few shirts she likes the look of, then a pair of black jeans that are cheap and look like she can cut into a good pair of shorts.

"It wasn't even in the top three shitty things that happened to me that week," says Alex, grinning. She pulls a sweater off her shirt, vaguely reminiscent of the black one that she'd loved back in New Haven and holds it up against herself.

Maeve has a pretty good idea of shitty things that happen to people, both those they're responsible for and those they aren't. A lot of shit had been building up for her in the day before coming here.

Talking about Elsie and Erin are not things that she's even remotely prepared to do, though, so she only looks at Alex and says, "Sounds like an even rougher landing, then, if that's not the worst of it all."

"Yeah, well, I'm still here, so it can't have been that bad," she says, draping the sweater over her arm and moving down the racks. "Darlington arriving helped. Guessing you don't have anyone from home here?"