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It’s an awkward drive back to Sioux Falls.
It’s full of uncomfortable questions and uncomfortable answers, stuffy silence that makes Kaia seriously consider ripping her skin off. Jody keeps trying to be nice , to talk to her, to get her to open up about her trauma or whatever, because apparently spending all the time she spent in the literal apocalyptic wasteland that plagued her nightmares since she was a little girl isn’t considered all that healthy.
Kaia thinks, if anything, she’s lost a bit of that particular childhood fear.
Somehow, it’s even worse when the drive’s over and they walk into the house. Alex and Patience are there. And- she's got no clue what Jody told them about her little vacation, but they walk on eggshells around her, clumsily avoiding all the difficult topics they possibly can to the point where they barely speak at all save for some clipped sentences here and there.
Kaia supposes it’s kind of nice, that they’re trying.
But she doesn’t really know them all that well, and besides-
They keep acting like she’s going to shatter any second, take a wrong step and break down, start screaming and crying and begging for- for what? Kaia doesn’t know, doesn’t even try to understand whatever it is that goes through their heads.
She just wants to rest. To be alone.
She asks for a bed to sleep in.
“Uh, yeah- yeah, yeah, of course,” Jody says, all hurried and eager to please, and she wasn’t really acting that way in the car, but it seems like Alex and Patience’s attitude may be contagious. “We don’t have a spare bedroom but Claire isn’t here yet, so you can take her room in the meantime,” she nods to herself, turns to Alex, “Sweetheart, did you change the sheets like I asked you?”
Alex opens her eyes very wide. “Shit. Fuck- I can- I can do it now, just give me a-”
But Patience grabs her arm before she can squirrel away, rolls her eyes. “I did it already. Before you got home. I knew you’d forget it.”
“Oh,” Alex breathes.
And then there’s more of that stuffy silence Kaia is starting to hate.
“I’m gonna- go, now,” she starts, awkwardly. “I’m tired.”
“Of course, Kaia, you must be exhausted,” Jody says, motherly and soft. Kaia isn’t sure she likes that tone either. “Feel free to take whatever from Claire’s closet, I’m sure she won’t mind.”
And maybe Kaia should thank her for letting her stay, no questions asked, for feeding her and clothing her and for not changing her mind after spending twelve or so hours trying to coax a conversation out of her and receiving nothing.
All she does is nod courtly and all but throw herself towards the staircase.
Claire’s room looks more or less exactly the same as she remembers it from those brief minutes all that time ago. It’s small, and so very Claire. It’s just a twin tucked in a corner near the door, all mismatched pillows and faded duvet, a bunch of trinkets thrown about carelessly. There's no art in the walls.
It still feels loved, though, lived in.
Kaia shuts the door behind her and breathes out.
She makes a beeline for the closet, allows herself to smile at the sight of the mess inside. It’s easy to picture Claire being scolded for letting her bedroom become messy and disorganized, and then deciding the obvious course of action is shoving her things in the closet where Jody won’t see them. Kaia digs through heaps of shoes, and plush animals, and weapons, until she finds a soft t-shirt with the logo of some movie from the eighties she vaguely remembers watching when she was a kid printed in the front.
She folds Jack’s clothes and puts them aside, changes into Claire’s shirt.
Then she’s turning off the light, laying on the bed.
She doesn’t sleep.
Doesn’t even try to, really.
There might be a deep-rooted fear somewhere in there, an incessant wondering of exactly what the hell is supposed to happen when she sleeps, now that that other Kaia is dead. Maybe now she won’t ever see the Bad Place again. Or maybe she will- plagued by nightmares, visions, her own memories mixed with the ones of another version of her.
She doesn’t know which option is worse.
In any case, she doesn’t sleep.
She lays in the dark, her eyes snapped shut, and lets the minutes bleed into hours and hours, until the light filtering through the shut door turns off, until Jody, and Alex, and Patience are tucked away in their own bedrooms.
She doesn’t sleep, and she lets time slip through her fingertips, and then, long after she’s drowsy and dozy, fighting sleep for some petulant reason she can’t quite comprehend, then, then she hears the distinct sound of a car’s brakes being pushed down a little too roughly, one of its doors being opened and shut a little too quickly.
Heavy footsteps.
Dangling keys, fumbled with, briefly dropped.
It can only be one person, can’t it?
But still- Kaia holds her breath, holds herself still.
She hears someone getting up from somewhere in the bedrooms, going down the stairs- Jody, probably, and then there are hushed whispers Kaia can’t understand a single word of no matter how hard she tries. There’s some whining, some sighing, and then-
Heavy footsteps.
Creaking stairs.
The door to Claire’s bedroom snaps open.
Kaia scrambles to sit up on the bed, and, for some painstakingly long seconds, she can’t really see anything at all- the light from the hallway allowing her nothing but a shapeless silhouette blocking the door. But then her eyes adjust to the light, and-
And it’s her.
It’s Claire.
She stares right at Kaia, and Kaia stares right back.
It’s funny- because after all that time in the Bad Place, Kaia though she surely must have been misremembering, surely those eyes, so open, so full of emotion, and love, and violence, couldn’t coexist with that face, those features, delicate and dainty.
Turns out she wasn’t misremembering.
The silence stretches, but this one time it doesn’t feel stuffy and uncomfortable, no, it feels- it feels expectant, and Kaia bathes in it, does nothing but note every single detail she possibly can about Claire, every new scar and the way her hair has changed.
They don’t move.
They don’t speak.
They don’t breathe.
And then-
Then Claire opens her mouth like she’s going to speak but no sound comes out save from a small croak, and Kaia sees it before it happens- Claire sobs, cries out something childish and vulnerable and so unlike her that Kaia doesn’t know what to do.
She allows herself all of two seconds to do nothing but watch helplessly before she’s flinging herself forward, crawling on her hands and knees towards the foot of the bed, towards Claire, and she thinks she’s being quick but Claire beats her to it and they meet somewhere in the middle, the both of them on the bed, on their knees, clinging to each other.
“Kaia,” Claire chokes out. “Kaia, Kaia, Kaia.”
And Kaia doesn’t know what to do, what to say, so she just clings to Claire’s shoulders, squeezes her middle, buries her face on the crook of her neck.
Claire cries, she cries as if it’s the only thing she’s ever known how to do, breathing in and out in quick succession, sobbing , whimpering, her heart beating a mile a minute against Kaia’s own. “Kaia ,” she keeps saying, like a prayer, “Kaia, Kaia.”
Kaia pulls away but doesn’t let go of her shoulders, doesn’t move far away enough from her that her fingers will leave their spot from where they’re clenched around her waist.
She rests her palms against Claire’s cheeks, wipes at her tears with her thumbs.
The tears keep coming.
She gives up- leaves her hands exactly where they are, though.
“I- I thought,” Claire starts, hiccuping and sniffing. Her eyes are wide, and open, and so very blue. “I thought you were dead, Kaia. I saw you die, I thought you were dead.”
Kaia nods, because- what the hell else can she do, anyway? “I know, I know. It’s okay.”
But Claire shakes her head side to side, sobs out something ugly and somehow louder. “No, it’s not okay. Jody said-” she cuts herself off to take a big gulp of air, “Shit- Jody said you were there the whole time- alone, Kaia. Alone in- in that place, and- and I left you there. I don’t-”
“Hey, no,” Kaia says, interrupting. She lets her hands wander back to Claire’s shoulders, the back of her neck. “No, Claire. It’s- it’s okay.”
It’s really not okay.
Not in the slightest.
But-
Claire is shaking, and sniffling, and she keeps looking at her like she’s something precious, and, far more importantly- it's not her fault. It’s so not okay, because Kaia thinks she’s forgotten how to be a person, how to look someone in the eye and not cower in fear, how to stand out in the open without her brain screaming at her that it’s either eat or being eaten, but it’s also not Claire’s fault . Not Claire, Claire who held her hand and promised all sorts of things no one had ever promised to her before, gentle and kind.
“It’s okay, Claire,” Kaia repeats, softly, for her and her only. “It’s- I’m here now, it’s okay.”
Claire keeps shaking her head. The tears keep rolling off her cheeks.
Kaia-
Kaia does the one thing she can think of.
She surges forward and plants her lips against Claire’s.
It’s a barely there kiss, just a peck of the lips, something small and insignificant, and Kaia kinda wants to light herself on fire the second she does it because it’s not like she’s allowed to do things like this, to even think about wanting things like this, because it’s not like Claire cares about the random teenage junkie she met for half a day some literal years ago half as much as said junkie cares about her, it’s not like Kaia deserves things like this.
She pulls away, and she wants to scream, but she doesn’t.
Claire stands there frozen.
Kaia digs her nails into her palms. “I’m- I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Claire doesn’t really react to her words, but her breath keeps coming in a little jagged, and the tears just won’t coming, and then-
Then Claire whimpers, loud and unabashed.
She whimpers, and before Kaia can begin to wonder what it means, she’s throwing herself forward, and her lips are crashing against Kaia’s, and it’s not short and innocuous and innocent like it was a moment ago, it’s all desperate and wet, full of a feeling that hangs heavy around them, that drowns out everything else.
Claire kisses her, and Kaia kisses back.
They kiss and they kiss and they kiss, and then Claire’s pushing her back against the pillows, straddling her hips and holding on tight.
Sometime between it all Claire breaks into tears once again, sobbing into her mouth, and this one time Kaia breaks into tears too because- fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, she spent an ungodly amount of time stuck in a nightmarish place, days, and months, and years, more time than she thought she could ever survive, thinking she was never going to see another human being ever again, thinking she’d never get the chance to live and kiss and cry.
They cry, and they kiss, and it’s probably the worst make out session that has ever existed, but still - it's good, it’s wonderful, it’s everything Kaia never allowed herself to wish for.
Claire pulls away, suddenly, wordlessly lets herself fall back in the bed, stares at the ceiling while they lay side by side, their shoulders touching.
The sound of their breaths is overtly loud, chests raising and falling fast enough that someone could mistakenly assume they just ran a marathon. Kaia wipes at her tears. Claire doesn’t.
They don’t speak, for a while.
Kaia thinks they should probably discuss whatever the hell just happened, talk about their lives, their pasts and their future.
But she-
She doesn’t really want to.
Not now, anyway.
She twists onto her side, looks Claire in the eye. “Sleep,” she announces, with no other explanation. “We- sleep.”
And Claire nods, looks at her all reverently, borderline worshipping, like she’d do literally anything Kaia asked her for, no questions asked. But she doesn’t move in the slightest.
So Kaia gets up, shuts the bedroom’s door softly, sits back down on the foot of the bed. She takes one of Claire’s boots and unlaces it gently, pulls it off her foot, does the same with the other one. Then she crawls forward and unbuttons her jeans, pulls them of her hips as delicately as she can manage. Claire watches her the whole time, quiet and adoring.
Kaia folds the jeans, sets the boots aside.
Then she curls under Claire’s arm and goes to sleep.