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They must make quite a sight, if they make a sight at all.
Steph has been gone for a while and in that time, the child has come to sit opposite Rory in the booth by the window in the diner. They don’t look much alike these days, they realise suddenly, not at all. The child is scrawny and small for her age, the promised growth spurt yet to come and delayed by choices made, with hair outgrown and matted as well as a fist-shaped bruise blooming beneath her cheek. Her face is rounded and still flushed in the way children are. That’s, of course, neglecting to mention the outdated and ragged clothes on them too. Rory now is tall and developed a musculature she never quite expected to have with her hair cropped short and well-kept with her skin almost blemishless if not for her fading scars, but that’s not truthfully typical for Rory. Her face has become thinner as she aged and paler too although hardly as shrunken as she feared it would be once. Her fashion isn’t quite fashionable but it’s clean, fitting and in good condition. The only sign they’re the same is the eyes, the same vicious and bitter green flashing in the light.
Rory has nothing to say to the child. She doesn’t even know why she’s here looking at her like that. If she wants something, she’s going to have to say it herself.
“Why are we going back?”
So that’s it, huh? The return home.
“We aren’t going back. I’m going back. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“That’s not true and you know it. Why are we going back. You said we were never going back.”
“You said that! Not me! And besides, I have to do this.”
“For her? Why should she get to decide whether or not we go back there? She wasn’t there! She doesn’t get it!”
“She does. You know that,” Rory could hear the exhaustion in her own voice, it was different to hear that rather than the harsh anger she usually did, that she heard in the child’s voice, “and besides, I was going to go back anyway. I have to.”
“No. We don’t.”
“If I don’t, I’ll regret it. I know that much. That is enough of a reason for me to go back.”
The child was gone when she looked up from her food.
Was she sulking or had they accepted what she was saying. It was hard to know. She was a different enough person now.