AN- This is my first Home and Away fic, so please be gentle. I don't own anything/anyone you may recognize, but I do own the mystery girl.
People often say that your life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die. You receive this picture show of memories, of moments you cherish and moments you regret. You see your best friend from preschool…your first pet…your first love. You can remember scents and sounds that you'd forgotten years before but could never quite recall. It's romantic almost, a calming wash before the end. How is it exactly that everyone has gotten it so wrong all this time?
I didn't get a fancy trip down memory lane. I didn't see old romances or dead pets. Instead, I got silence-an oppressive silence that forced the air out of my lungs…the kind of silence that follows the unearthly screeching of breaks. It was the silence that comes right before the impact. It was like a pregnant moment of nothing before chaos broke loose. After that, I can remember flashes—bits and pieces floating in the silence. The smell of burning rubber…of gasoline…of blood.
If only I had gotten what was meant to come after. If only that had been the end.
As the bus pulled into the station at Summer Bay, a young female passenger abruptly shut the diary she'd been writing in and started to gather her things. Her thin fingers made quick work of stowing the book in her worn out backpack and smoothing out the few wrinkles that had taken up residence on her clothing from the long ride. While walking down the narrow aisle between the seats, she did her best to avoid smacking anyone in the head with her things and carefully stepped down the steep stairs.
"Thank you, sir," she said to the older driver, her quiet American accent giving away her tourist status in the country. He nodded with a tired smile at her as she left; he eyed her tattered bag and the canister she gripped to her chest. He'd seen a lot of sketchy people in his 20 some years working for the bus company, but this young woman seemed worse off than most. If the off-colored plaster cast on her left arm wasn't enough to give it away, the deep bags he'd seen under her eyes when she boarded illustrated her state. There was nothing he could do though as she stepped down the few feet off the bus. All he could do was send up a prayer as he closed the doors behind her, a prayer that she found her way.
The girl stepped out into the harsh mid-afternoon sun, scratched Ray Ban sunglasses coming to rest on her thin nose from their position nestled in her mousy brown hair. She walked out of the street and onto the walkway overlooking a small restaurant that was next to the beach. The smell of the salt water reached her nose as a gentle breeze carried it in from the sea. A smile ghosted across her tired face before disappearing as quickly as it came, her soft pink lips returning to their concerned frown despite the still healing cut across the side of the bottom lip.
"Drink…then beach," she said to no one in particular, turning to look at the small restaurant again. She hitched the backpack higher on her shoulder as she started to walk down the path to the little building, her casted left hand gripping the strap and her free right holding tightly to the canister. She walked into the diner as she had discovered and it seemed like everyone in the joint had turned to stare at her as she pushed her sunglasses back up into her hair. She started to get that same feeling, the one where all the air seems to rush out of a room and your lungs. Instead of turning and running out, she walked right over to the counter to a woman with a fancy up-do of bright blonde hair.
"Hello there! What can I get for you dear?" Marilyn asked with her usual perkiness. She was struggling not to stare at the yellowing bruises on the young woman's face and arms, urging her to make a decision before she wasn't able to keep her opinion in check.
"Can I just get an orange juice, please?" the mystery girl asked quietly, shifting slightly in her orange flip flops. She was acutely aware that everyone was still staring at her and her American accent wasn't going to help things. Apparently, it seemed she had stumbled into a diner filled with a lot of locals—the perfect place for her to stick out like a sore thumb.
"Oh an American? It's been a while since we had an American visitor, hasn't it Irene?" Marilyn commented as she went to grab the juice.
"We don't get many Americans up here, we're a bit off the grid. Are you just passing through darl?" Irene asks, taking in the young woman's appearance. Aside from the fading bruises, she looked like an attractive girl. She wasn't too tall, but she was thin and lean. Her fair skin contrasted nicely with her blue tank, revealing a smattering of freckles up and down her arms and across her nose.
"Something like that…" the girl said vaguely, jostling the canister to her casted arm to get out the last of her cash from her jean pocket. She had just enough for the juice and virtually nothing else to live on now that she'd reached as far as she could go in Australia. Huffing quietly, she grabbed the cool bottle and moved to walk out toward the beach. "Thanks for the juice."
"Oh not a problem darl, if you need anything while you're in town just come here. I'm Irene and this here is Marilyn. We're always looking to help out visitors," the kind auburn haired woman shouted as the mystery girl walked out. She smiled at the two women, though the act didn't quite reach her tired dark blue eyes. She had yet to run into anyone in Australia that was as genuinely unkind and uncaring as Americans could be sometimes.
She stopped by an entrance down to the beach to take off her flip flops and stow them in her bag before walking down toward the crashes of the waves. The sand felt so good between her toes, warm and soft as she walked closer to the bright blue of the Pacific. It looked so different here. It was the same ocean that had washed up on the shores of Los Angeles where she'd left the United States from, but it felt different. This beach…this ocean was serene. It was an untouched cove on the coast of Australia, unmarred by tourism and the pollution of trade. And it was warm!
After practically 30 minutes of walking up and down that small stretch of beach, the girl walked up toward the dunes and settled herself in the sand there to sit down for a while. She took great care to wedge the canister in the sand off to her right, making sure it wasn't going to roll down the incline of the dune and out into the ocean. She leaned forward slightly, resting her arms on her knees as she looked out over the rumbling waves, her steel-blue eyes scanning the horizon.
"Well Jax, we're here. Now what?" she asked quietly, looking out over the sea like it had the answer. Her eyebrows furrowed slightly as her eyes started to water, a tear slipping down her cheek. She struggled not to open the floodgates, not noticing the man walking down the beach in her direction who was unable to hold back tears of his own.