A/N: This is based around the idea that Maura wasn't adopted by the Isles and was put in an orphanage instead. Slight trigger for bullying etc.
She's there every day, pressed into the back corner of the double seat. She shrinks away from the rowdy youths around her, reserved, withdrawn. Words float over her head, they talk around her, never to her and she presses herself further and further into the torn, red leather chair.
Some days brown eyes looks wistfully out the window, others they're enraptured by Virginia Woolf. Alabaster skin stretches over a small mouth and slowly her lips form the remnants of words as she reads them from the page in front. Soft cheekbones and a proud forehead are hidden under a mass of ropey caramel curls that tumble to her waist. Sometimes she looks up. Eyes the color of mud, flecked with gold glance briefly around, the pain of a thousand taunts buried just under the surface.
Others splay their unruly limbs about; she sits, feet pointed in order to touch the ground. The pale blue dress hangs off her frame, perhaps a size too big and stained with the dirt of a teasing gone too far. When the bus empties and she is the only one left a delicate finger folds the page of her book. She walks, with a balanced grace, toward the front of the vehicle.
Barely there, the vestiges of a musical whisper cross her lips, "Thank you," and then she is gone, until the next day, when she will be back, with a new book and the trails of fresh tears on her cheeks.
Maura thinks today might be a good day. No-one pushed her. They teased her yes, that would be too good to be true, but no one pushed her, so today she doesn't need to escape.
Timidly she raises her eyes from the dirty bus floor and gazes out the window. Students mill around, laughing, chatting with their friends. She is always the first on the bus; she doesn't have any friends to talk to.
The windows are open, and goose bumps rise on her skin. Her dress is pink today, it's her favorite, but that doesn't stop it from letting little gusts of ice cold air through it's threadbare fabric. She wonders if maybe she could close a window, would anyone else mind? She decides against it, they all have jackets, they aren't cold.
The world is buzzing outside the bus window, so she's not sure how she manages to hear it, but the somehow the deep, smooth laugh reaches her. She's only ever had a hot shower three times in her life. She remembers the way the hot liquid would slide down her back and cocoon her. She remembers what it feels like to be warm.
She's only ever had a hot shower three times in her life, but now she's felt that indescribable sanctuary of safety and warmth four times. And then it stops.
Maura presses her face against the window, now she's even colder and her breath is fogging up the glass but that doesn't matter. Her eyes scan the crowd for the source of the laughter but as more and more kids clamber onto their afternoon buses she gets a sinking feeling within her stomach. Still, she keeps looking, and when the bus pulls out of the school gates the girl who usually has her head buried in a book is craning her neck, looking backwards, straining her ears just to hear that voice once more.
"What are you looking at book worm?"
And then she stops looking.
Didn't your parents want you? Book worm. Nerd. Nobody wants you here. What's with the sack, couldn't you find any real clothes in the dumpster? Worthless. Leave. Teachers pet. Maur-a the Bore-a. You don't have any friends. You aren't even that smart. Ugly. You were an accident.
Nobody loves you.
She shakes in her bed at night. Tears drip down her nose to pool on an already tear stained pillow. Gaunt knees are pulled up to a heaving chest. And maybe she believes them.
No one ever told her any different.
"What do we have here?"
Her stomach drops. A cold, hard rock settles in her gut and she knows today will not be a good day.
There's three of them now, that's one more than there was on Monday.
She draws her knees up to her chest, protecting her book and small brown paper bag with her body.
"Come on book worm, you're not afraid are you?"
This is the most scared she's been in a long time.
One of them spits on the ground next to her, she flinches, they laugh.
She has learned that defiance will get her nothing but a bruise, so when her arm is shoved roughly to the side she does nothing to stop it. A cry lodges itself in her throat as a sausage fingered hand takes both her book and her paper bag. She sniffs, they sneer.
"What, did the mice eat your tongue as well as your dress?"
They empty her bag onto the ground, her small brown apple rolls across the cement, and the crusty piece of bread breaks as it hits the ground,
They cackle. A single tear rolls down her cheek.
She will go hungry again today.
But they aren't finished.
She knows what they're going to do. Tiny hands push up from the ground and her legs feel like jelly. Before she is even upright, she's sent sprawling.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and she waits. Impact. Concrete bites and she can feel skin being torn away from her shoulder and legs.
She brings her knees to her chest and she stays there, lying on the ground, shivering, blood trickling down her limbs, broken.
Muffled laughter. The sound of tearing pages. Footsteps. Silence.
If she tries hard enough she thinks she might able to lie there and ignore the hot, metallic smell of her own blood. If she tries hard enough she thinks she might be able to forget the sound her book made as it was destroyed. If she tries hard enough she thinks she might be able to imagine her stomach isn't growling with hunger. If she tries hard enough she thinks she might be able to remember what it feels like to be loved.
She lies in a ball on the ground. Blood seeps into the concrete. Tiny shreds of paper flutter, like one thousand tiny ballet dancers in the wind.
One scrap clings to a tear stained cheek.
"Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape."
She doesn't know a life without suffering. She can't remember a time when she wasn't broken. She never knew what shape she was. She only knew she didn't fit.
A/N: Quote is from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
There can be more to this if anyone is interested. Merry Christmas!