Additional Disclaimer: I'm not sure who owns Eerie, Indiana now but it was created by Karl Schaefer and Jose Rivera. This is a derivative work.
Summary: See Part I.
Spoilers: All seasons of BtVS and Highlander. Eerie, Indiana - all of it.
Revision Posted: 18-Jul-2009
Chapter Title: Leaving Winter Camp
It didn't take hindsight to realize that she hadn't put enough thought or planning into running away. Fann knew she'd been very lucky to get as far as she had without any complications. For a spur of the moment action it had actually gone very well. It was almost as if someone or something was looking out for her. Weeks into her journey, although she still missed Alice and Willa, nothing had happened to change her mind about the decision to leave. It was one of the few decisions she hoped she wouldn't regret later.
While she still had a little bit of money left; her few clothes; and her mother's bike; once her money ran out she was going to be in serious trouble if she couldn't find another way to support herself. And she needed to find someone who could get her some kind of believable ID that said she was older. Her only form of ID, other than a driver's license that barely had the shine rubbed off, was an ATM card.
As she travelled she kept to herself. She couldn't afford to be stopped by any nosy grownup, official or not. There were too many places in the country where she wasn't legally old enough to be out on her own. And using the bike to get around simply compounded the problem. She knew that she wasn't exactly inconspicuous on it but it was one of the few things she had left from her mother and she refused to give it up. It also meant she couldn't take the risk of making any real friends along the way.
At the beginning of her journey she'd spent nine long weeks wandering down back roads and through small towns between Maine and Ohio, no clear destination in mind other than following her earlier impulse to head in a gradually western direction. She had tried to avoid spending the slowly dwindling money in her bank account but just living had managed to eat a noticeable hole in her funds. This added to the stress she found herself under traveling by herself. There were too many things that could happen that she might possibly need money for. If something happened to her bike; if she got sick or had an accident. Slightly superstitious, she was almost afraid to think about it.
And so many other things could go wrong. Too many times for comfort, she'd spent the night huddled in her current cheap hotel room trying to forget that someone had looked at her in a way that made her feel like something slimy was crawling up her back. Or that some strange man or the occasional woman had asked too many questions about where she was living or where she was going. The freedom of traveling by herself came with the price of feeling almost naked and exposed. A feeling she couldn't remember experiencing at home.
So she spent as little of her money as possible and worked hard to find the odd waitressing job along the way to supplement it. It had taken a few weeks but she'd eventually managed to figure out the small clues that indicated which restaurants and diners were most likely to hire someone her age for a week or two, no questions asked. She hadn't had any experience waitressing in the beginning, making it much harder, but luckily it was the holiday season and if she looked hard enough there were jobs. After a few false starts she'd learned enough to have the confidence to appear much older and more experienced than she was so that she could get a job when she really needed one.
She'd made it a practice to stop in moderately small towns as she headed southwest. Towns that were not so small that it would be hard to remain unnoticed by the local busy-bodies and not so large that she had to take the lowest paying and dirtiest restaurant jobs. Getting a job at one of the many fast food places along the way was a bit more difficult, no matter where she stopped. They tended to pay more attention to things like age and your last address, making it harder to find work if you were just passing through.
She hadn't made it as far south as she'd originally planned and after a lonely Christmas on the road, Fann found herself in Eerie, Indiana. From the moment she rode into town, Fann could feel that there was something very strange about Eerie.
She'd been there for a week and was already making plans for the next part of her journey when several vicious winter storms hit the small town. She'd ridden in bad weather before in the course of her trip. She'd even spent some of her precious cash on cold weather gear. But Fann didn't consider herself foolish enough to attempt to take her bike out in such rough winter weather. Resigning herself to staying in town for the next several months until the weather cleared, Fann went hunting for a job.
She was lucky enough to find a place to stay while cooking and manning the food counter at a quirky store downtown. 'World O' Stuff' was an old fashioned general store that seemed to stock everything under the sun. It was also the local teen hangout and the center of much of the strangeness she felt during her time in Eerie.
It wasn't necessarily a bad feeling, just a slight tingle at the back of her neck. But something was definitely off in Eerie. And it wasn't just the Elvis look-alike or the claims by Marshall and Simon, two of the younger 'Stuff' regulars, that Bigfoot was a regular visitor to the town.
It was a bitterly cold March morning. Her hands freezing in the thin leather gloves she normally wore while riding, Fann shivered as she unlocked her bike and wheeled it out of the shed she'd found in Eerie to store it in during the worst winter weather. She'd been stuck in Eerie much longer than she'd expected, until the roads started to thaw. As much as she enjoyed the freedom offered by her bike, it wasn't much use once the weather turned cold and snow covered the roads. Her choice had been to either abandon her bike, something she was loath to do, and eat into her cash moving cross country by bus or wait for the weather and roads to clear.
The weather had given Fann plenty of time to think about things while she waited. It was the longest she'd stopped in a single place since she'd left home. Fortunately, the people of Eerie had accepted her presence without much thought. In a town where the weird was a daily occurrence a teenager traveling alone and paying her own way didn't attract much attention. The residents seemed to take the weirdness in stride but for her Valentine's Day would never be the same again.
She still didn't have a real destination in mind, just the continual impulse to head towards the Pacific coast. She'd been gently pulled in that direction all winter. But now that she was ready to get back out on the road she felt no hurry to get there. Wherever 'there' was. All she wanted to do was ride, to feel the road beneath her saddle. But she knew she needed to find a real purpose somewhere along the way. As tempting as it was she couldn't wander the roads aimlessly forever.
Fann looked up at the gray sky and grimaced. Climbing onto her bike, Fann took one last look around before pulling on her helmet and putting her bike into motion. She wouldn't miss Eerie. She'd had enough of Indiana, especially this town. While she'd grown up in a small town, this one was just too different. The occasional weird event she could handle, but almost every week something major on the weirdness scale had occurred in Eerie. And after spending so much time in small towns, working for a week or two as a waitress in the occasional diner or restaurant, she was ready to try her luck in some place hopefully larger and saner, like New Orleans.
Fann chased the warm weather all the way south from Eerie, sticking to the inter-state highways the entire way. She travelled towards the Gulf coast in the calm, methodical fashion she'd perfected at the beginning of her journey to avoid attracting attention. Not being much of a country music fan, she didn't stop on her way through Nashville. It was just another exit on the highway where the traffic had more than its' fair share of bad drivers. After weeks of inactivity, where the closest she could get to riding her bike was brushing the dust off of it where it sat in the shed she'd found for it, Fann reached the Louisiana border exhausted and sore from the long, eight hundred mile ride.
There was something really wrong in New Orleans. She wasn't sure what was causing it but something about the city grated on Fann's nerves. She found a cheap motel near the restaurant district and tried to come down from the trip, to calm down from the buzz of being on the road again. She was only partially successful. Lying in the dark in her room, the dreams came back with a vengeance. But unlike the seemingly random nightmares she'd suffered through the previous summer, these had a different feeling to them. No longer as frightening, almost hopeful, she thought they were trying to tell her something but she didn't quite know what it was or even how to interpret them.
Even after the exhausting trip she was up early the next day, ready to go out and find a job. She could afford a week or two on the remains of her meager savings from her winter stay in Indiana but after that she would have to dip into her emergency funds. During her almost five months on the road she'd been lucky and had been able to earn just enough to avoid doing that but she didn't expect it to last. As she dressed she marveled at how much she'd changed since running away. She'd always been a little more organized than her peers but living on her own and the need to settle in and find a job in unfamiliar places as she travelled had forced her to change the way she looked at and prioritized things. Fun could happen after she found a job.
Grabbing a bus schedule and tourist map from the motel office, Fann set out to explore the city and to find a job. A more permanent place to stay could wait until she'd decided how long she wanted to stay in the area. The first diner she stopped at didn't have any openings. By the fifth she was starting to become frustrated and hungry. After buying a quick lunch from a street vendor, Fann headed back to her motel.
In serious need of a break, Fann was crossing the street a block from her motel when it happened. A small foreign car of some sort careened around the corner at a very high speed, directly into her path. Even with her quick reflexes there was really no place to go in the split second it took her to react. She instinctively jumped out of the way but the car still managed to knock her into the side of another car parked on the curb.
The pain from the impact caused her to lay there for what seemed like forever, but it couldn't have been more than a minute before she managed to pull herself together and push herself up from the ground. She hurt all over, like she was one large bruise, especially her head. In the ten months since the nightmares had begun she'd become stronger and faster but this was the first time she'd actually been hurt. Staggering upright she was surprised to see a large dent in the car where she'd hit it. She must have collided with it pretty hard. From the looks of the car she should have been hurt a lot worse than she thought she'd been. "Guess I'm tougher now too..." She mumbled to herself. Or tried to through a pink haze.
She leaned back against the car, trying to catch her breath and waiting for her vision to clear. Feeling for the spot on the back of her head that hurt the most, Fann felt something wet and slightly sticky with her fingers. Pulling them away from her head she was shocked to find her fingers coated with blood. She stayed there for a minute staring at them in horror. Something in her head was telling her that bleeding was a very bad thing. Something instinctual that insisted that she needed to get off the street and have it taken care of before anyone or anything saw she was hurt. That she was weak.
Grimacing as she touched sore spots she was sure were already bruising, Fann gently brushed the dirt from her clothes, glad she'd decided to dress casually for once while out job hunting. Instead of the slightly more refined clothes she normally wore to make herself look older she'd gone out in boots, jeans and a heavy work shirt, now showing evidence of her collision with both cars. She was just finishing examining the damage when she heard the high pitched sound of a high performance car approaching. Glancing up towards the sound, Fann saw a slim woman with short blonde hair unfolding herself from the low yellow car that had hit her several minutes earlier.
"Are you okay?" She asked, speaking with a faint accent Fann couldn't quite identify.
"Sure. I'm fine," Fann muttered sarcastically, not directly addressing her. "I get run over every day. No big deal." She stood up completely, steeling herself against the soreness that seemed to envelope her complaining muscles. She rubbed the sore spot on her head before she remembered why it really wasn't such a good idea. "Yow!" she blurted out in surprise as she pulled her hand away from her head.
The woman walked quickly around her car towards Fann. Fann was too surprised to resist as the slightly taller woman gently prodded her injury with long, slim fingers. "That isn't too bad. It's already stopped bleeding," She told Fann clinically. "You should probably wash it and put something on it."
"I was just going to. If you'll excuse me..." Fann told her in her politest 'don't mess with me' voice.
"I can give you a ride," the woman offered, apparently not phased by the tone of the abrupt dismissal. "It's the least I can do. Where were you going?"
Fann looked at her curiously. There was something about this woman that was setting off all sorts of alarms in her head, making her wary. Her enhanced senses were telling Fann that this woman wasn't quite what she appeared to be. "Thanks for the generous offer but I'll be fine," she said, firmly refusing.
"Why don't I at least buy you dinner?" the woman suggested.
"It's too early and I don't go to dinner with strangers," Fann told her politely, assuming that would end it.
"Okay. I'm Amanda," she said, offering Fann her hand with a sly wink. "Nice to meet you. And you are?"
Fann stared at her for a moment in surprise before answering. "Fann. Is my name."
"Okay. Now you know me," Amanda told her with a small grin. "What about dinner tonight?"
"Umm... No," Fann said, refusing again, anxious to get back to her hotel. "I've got to go. Thanks anyway."
"Okay..." Amanda seemed to think for a moment. Going over to her car, she grabbed something out of it. Turning back to Fann she handed her a small slip of paper. "Here. If you feel like dinner you can reach me at my hotel at six. Meet me in the lobby."
Fann just shook her head at the determined woman, not sure why she was so insistent on buying her dinner. Amanda squeezed her shoulder before turning around and climbing back into her idling car. With a shouted "Don't forget! Six!" she drove off, leaving Fann standing in the street, staring at her disappearing car in bemusement for a moment. She pulled herself together and headed back to her motel to take care of the cut on her head and change into clean clothes before getting back out on the street to find a job.
While the afternoon had not led to any definite employment, the disappointing morning had faded from her mind and back in her motel room Fann was now more optimistic that she would find something before the end of the week. She no longer thought she would have to dip too deeply into her meager cash reserves. And as soon as she had a job she could start looking for an apartment or boarding house.
She could only sit for so long, flipping through the channels on the TV in her motel room, before boredom forced her out into the street. In the months since gaining her enhanced senses the only real cure for the restlessness she felt every night was physical activity. When she wasn't working that usually took the form of long rambling walks late into the night.
Tonight she only partially succumbed to the impulse. While enjoying the remaining daylight, she found herself wandering down the street towards the hotel Amanda had claimed to be staying at. As she stepped into the lobby and looked around she wasn't quite sure why she was there. It went against her sense of self preservation, which she'd developed during her months on the road. Except for the offer of a real meal, Fann had no real interest in anything the woman might offer her. She was about to turn around and leave when, out the corner of one eye, she caught sight of Amanda heading her way.
AN1: I'd originally planned on setting an entire part in Eerie, Indiana but it obviously didn't happen. Maybe some other time if I feel inspired.
AN2: There are no plans for Amanda and Fann to be more than friends. This is not that kind of story.
