Once, there was an island.... // MPHFPC one shots, imagines, and misc !

Abbey { Apoc! AU Claire Densmore}

I am waiting,
I have been waiting,
I was born waiting....

Some nights, she didn't recognize herself.
Others, she couldn't remember being anyone else.
Claire kept a mirror in her room, shoved deep in her closet so Wyn wouldn't take it from her. She'd drag it out in the middle of the night. Prop it up against her desk. Light a candle.
She lost so much sleep, staring into that looking glass. Her face had aged, the first steps towards matching her eyes. Her perfect blue eyes, untouched by time for so very long. In the hours she studied her features, she discovered a reservoir deep in herself.
An ocean so deep and so unknown that it scared her senseless, yet overflowed and filled her with a painful realization. One she had been aching to acknowledge, yet scrambling to avoid.
She found she was hungry. She had been hungry. Perhaps, she was born hungry. Yet somehow, in that dim, constant memory of hunger, the lingering pain in her stomach, she still couldn't understand what she needed. 
Once, she had been something. Claire kept reaching for that something again, her fingertips brushing its surface in the deep dark. So close, it was so very close, she could feel its breath on her palms and she could hear it's sobs surrounding her. How she longed to slip back into skin that was far too small for her, yet welcomed her with warm familiarity.
She wanted to be set free. She wanted to melt like the candle beside her, into a lumpy puddle of pink and white and perfect blue wax. She wanted her legs to mold to the floor and her palms to the mirror. If it only meant she could stay.
Claire never knew what she was looking for. She just knew she had yet to find it. She searched her face every single night, her eyes ruined by time and her hair that never stopped curling at the ends. Her hands, callused by archery. Her teeth, somehow as perfect as she was, and the ones on the back as sharp as knives.
Her lips were chapped, her eyes lured down by bags, her hands endlessly shaky.
After all, it was only the end.
And she still couldn't find it.

Tonight, Claire was trying to feed herself.
She savored everything her makeshift home had to offer- everything this deary old aquarium could spare. That hunger followed her like a ghost, no matter how much she ate. Bronwyn whispered how worried she was to an indifferent Emma. Emma, who had been gone for years, Emma, who showed up now in all her fiery brilliance, Emma, who relit this kindle of disaster deep in the reservoir Claire harbored. A flame dancing in deep ocean waves, golden orange igniting infinite black.

Emma, who looked at Claire as if she was a stranger, and not the girl who had clung to her blue dress or stole sweets from under the table.

The backmouthed girl wandered the halls, tracing the peeling painted waves and wondering just how long she'd have to wait. There was a light, somewhere, a solution. She could taste it- the bitter scent of metal and gasoline stinging her nose and bile boiling on her tongue. 
If there was an end, she could suffocate this feeling. 
She wasn't a little kid anymore, and she would't go huddling under her blankets the second her world shifted. No matter how badly she wanted to. 
Claire had never handled change well. She favored stability, the comfortable silence that came with safety. She never understood why people rushed into it. Why they'd recklessly jump over waterfalls and plummet to the ocean, why they'd swallow themselves whole in their desire for risk. 
Enoch had called it metathesiophobia. He knew phobias, Horace had said, when Claire had gone to him in tears when the world ended. Enoch knew everything. He handled the blood and guts and change as if it was nothing more than an inconvenient obstacle. As if the very fabric of everything wasn't being torn down around them, like curtains from a stage. 
It terrified her, having a name for the beast. 
Enoch had tried to help her with it, when Bronwyn wasn't fussing like a mother. He had tried to be patient- understanding, like Wyn and Horace and Hugh were. But he wasn't like that, and Claire knew it. She wasn't like that either. She wasn't like Olive, she couldn't change at the drop of a dime. Olive was flexible and joyous and so very free, and Claire was stiff, and stone, and jealous. 
Jealous, because she had waited her entire life to feel like that, and it seemed to run from her. 
That  was her something. She wanted to feel like a little kid again, and that bliss was the something. The item to fill the chasm. The last piece.
She'd lie awake in the night, whispering to the stars beyond the tattered roof. Beyond the tarps keeping out the rain, the broken glass swept into a corner. Let me be something, she'd pray. Anything. Anything but this void.
And the stars would smile, and turn their backs on her.

Some things only appear in the dark of sleep. 
And so, though her bones ached at the very thought of it, she would wait.
And trace her reflection in the mirror by a low burning candle.
And Claire would wait, as she had before. 
Because the world was still waiting for her, too. 

...I was born waiting for that something,
just one something.