xp_logs | Oh god. the beach.

Ficlet inspired by the newly planned trip to the beach. Let's hope that this trip is better than her first trip.

The Morlocks were massacred on a Tuesday, and by Friday she'd stolen a car from the parking lot of a local apartment complex and driven it out to the coast with nothing but the clothes on her back and a fake license so good it could have gotten her into any bar in the country. Nearly thirteen, she was learning to hold her liquor like a man twice her size, and to act like she couldn't.

So she drove. It didn't matter where, what section of the beach, or what she would do when she got there, she just wanted out. It was four in the morning according to the car radio when she pulled into the abandoned beach parking lot and wiggled her bare toes in the cold sand for the first time in her life. She sat by the dunes, curled up away from the black water lapping on the grey early morning sand. Arms curled tightly around her knees, she sat, blankly staring into the darkness.

The wind whipped around her, reminding her of the wind on top of the skyscrapers. She'd curiously gone up one only days before, and found herself sobbing helplessly at the top, too scared to move for fear that moving from the center of the roof meant she was too close to the edge. She'd finally made her way down the stairwell, counting each individual step to keep from breaking down again. One, Two, Three, almost there....

And now she sat, just like before, huddled against the bitterly cold wind, motionless. Only difference was now she couldn't cry. Fuck knows she wanted to; wanted to cry herself to sleep again, listening to the crashing waves and the sound of gulls picking at the trashcans, but the tears just wouldn't come. She felt so incredibly empty, so she supposed, the whole staring into darkness thing was very fitting, but it only made her feel worse. The Morlocks were dead, and she was too numb to do anything about it. They'd have been so disappointed.

Sitting there, she wondered if this wasn't some sort of test. They weren't really dead, just waiting for her to figure out the puzzle and come running head-first and triumphant to the place where they waited. Instead, she sat freezing, miles away from the tunnels, wanting nothing more than to cry like any normal kid would have. Such a monster, I can't even _cry_.

She waited until the sun rose for some sort of sign, an epiphany that would make everything okay, but it never came and when the early morning runners began to populate the seashore, she left silently, lifting an oversized sweatshirt from a local surf shop and hitchhiking her way back to the tunnels, where at least she'd be as alone as she felt.