A/N: I've been super busy with Various Things In Life. If you're still reading, thank you. I located a PLL timeline, and I'm pulling a lot of info from there, but I'm still being a bit creative with it.
Oh – and I really don't encourage the things Alison is doing to survive. Also, I'm not in any way trying to make light of hospitalization for mental illness. Possible TW for canon drug use.
Chapter 6 – April 2011.
She goes back to Rosewood for the third stealth visit, and this time she feels like there's a billboard announcing her presence in town, maybe a couple of spotlights on her shoulder. Spencer is loopy from the drugs for her wrist and Alison makes coffee while Spencer is too dazed to notice what's going on around her. She sits in warmth, sturdy building and shelter all around her, and drinks good coffee and one part of her luxuriates in it.
It feels a bit like being home, even as her skin crawls from being back. If A can see Spencer, then logic dictates she can see Alison. She goes to the kitchen and snags a few pieces of fruit, devours the apple hungrily and stashes other pieces in her bag, sits with Spencer. The drugs are strong, she knows this already. Chances are, this will all seem to be a dream for Spencer – she's not all that conscious now.
Alison talks to Spencer, dropping cryptic hints everywhere she can, looks around the room at the various knick-knacks and all she sees is money.
She has a substantial amount on her person now, sewed into the pocket of her jeans and tucked into her bra, wodged into a thick hairclip and under the lining of her right shoe, but it's never enough. There's always some travel to keep safe, keep from getting comfortable and recognized in an area.
A wallet is on the kitchen table, and with a glance back at Spencer, she ruffles through it.
She shouldn't do it. Spencer is her friend. She shouldn't be even thinking of stealing from her friend.
They're not friends. Alison is dead. Has been for seven months and this is just a dream.
(you can't be present-tense friends with a dead girl)
The money in the wallet is a thick stack and there's so many twenties – she checks the license. Mr Hastings probably won't even notice if one happens to fall out.
She feels only a bit of guilt as she palms it, pocketing it deftly. Stares over at Spencer sleeping on the couch and tucks a blanket around her, puts the pill bottles over on the table. They'll be the first thing she sees when she wakes up, they'll keep her grip on this conversation tenuous. Tomorrow, she'll go to school and tell the others how she dreamed a conversation with Alison.
0o0o0o0
She wants to see the others, but there's no time. Jenna is pretending to not be blind, and Aria's mind is on Ezra. A blew up a building and two of her friends could have died.
It all bites at her mind, claws at her. This is what's happened since you left, imagine if you had stayed.
Imagine what would happen if you had never left.
She tells herself that if she had stayed, stayed there as a living girl, she would have kept a tighter rein on Rosewood. She'd be there as a target for A and maybe she'd manipulate her way around, make it so her friends don't nearly die in burning buildings.
(she's never liked fire)
Anyway, she came into Rosewood as a ghost and left as a drug-induced hallucination. She takes it, because hallucinations are more real than ghosts. Ghosts are maybe real, and maybe not, and she doesn't want to be either because then she really is dead, and she isn't free to reveal herself as still living.
Hallucinations though, they tend to have a basis in reality. She was there, real and breathing, in the Hastings' living room, and now she's here, breath fogging up the window of a bus stop, still real and breathing.
The bus pulls up to the stop and she counts out the money that came from the Hastings wallets, just enough small denominations and a few coins that never get noticed. Buys a ticket to – she's not sure where, all that matters to her is that she gets far away and stops debating on if she prefers being ghost or hallucination. Her mind works strangely like that, sometimes. It was worse after she'd pulled Emily from the gas fumes in a barn, and she resigns herself to being hallucinated-girl.
What if I was still alive, she whispered to the air around her, once she was sure she was alone. It was risky, stupid, useless sentiment, but she did want to know the answer.
She pulls the hood over her head and leans against the window, lets herself wander.
0o0o0o0
It's two states and five cities away that she checks the news. What is going on there is what she wanted to ask Spencer. What's going on when the girls are letting A rule them and blow up buildings and they're being stupid enough to go running towards danger at every turn.
She used to have a policy of "don't ask, you might get an answer" and she finds that Mona is A.
Garrett Reynolds is arrested for her murder.
One of these things is not like the other, she thinks, lying in a motel bed. She laughs hysterically, silently enough that her neighbour won't notice. Mona, A.
She's brought back seven months in time when Mona timidly suggested she do what A wanted and disappear, and hears why don't you do what I want you to do. No wonder Mona became the new queen bee of school – she's grown so bold as to run around committing crimes in her free time while making over Hanna in her dead best friend's image.
Jealousy scorches through Alison's veins as she reads the newest coverage, paying a stupid amount from her funds to cover the internet costs. Here's Mona, beautiful and sleek and smart and elegant. Half of the photos have Hanna with her and Alison grits her teeth at the thought that Hanna is foil to Mona.
It used to be she was Alison's foil.
She recognizes that Mona is noted, notorious, wild, even as she's no doubt being sedated in hospital. Mona has accomplished an immortality even beyond what Alison wanted – she is the tragic villain, the deceitful best friend, the loyal girl who's a little in love with her friendships – and yet she lives.
Alison is just a dead villain-bitch who wasn't loyal, didn't love deeply.
She envies Mona a little bit, that capacity for great love or great destruction. Think of how much anyone could do with that.
She reads that it was all for Hanna, all because of Hanna. Tries to balance it, picture herself scorching the earth for Emily. It's hard to visualize, and she wonders if that's the problem – that she didn't love enough, and destroyed too much.
The girls don't visit her grave as much anymore, but they bring Mona cookies in hospital and half the girl's social media feeds are well-wishes.
(people are probably keeping their scorn for in private, she notes)
Shoving the computer mouse away, she cleans her computer history and leaves.
0o0o0o0
She journals furiously for a while, pulls out the sheets that she keeps updated with where she can go and who she can call if she needs a cheap place. One of the women, she remembers, is someone's aunt – needs a cleaner to live in for a few months – so she calls, and makes all the arrangements. Within a week she's all set up with her train tickets and stash of money hidden.
Maybe it's time to set up a decoy bank account, she considers. Keep the cash safe – oh, but she doesn't have any of the necessary paperwork. No fixed address for correspondence, and she hasn't even chanced setting up a generic email.
On the train, she sits silently and curses Mona.
It occurs to her that she could go back. It's June now, and it's summer. If she goes there will be endless questions, but Mona is in hospital. The A-game is over and done.
0o0o0o0
She doesn't go back.
If she allows herself to think deeper, she realizes Mona is quite possibly playing a longer game, the kind where she sacrifices a few months out of her life and remains in hospital while still playing. When she thinks about it, Mona has already spent weeks running around in the dark and swapping between multiple phones, playing a two-faced game.
What's another few months in comparison?
Anyway, she's dead. Alison has time.
0o0o0o0
Summer falls for real now, and the days are hot, sticky. She buys a water bottle and freezes it every night before going to bed, takes ice water with her on her every travel, spends as much time as she can in air-conditioned rooms and buildings.
Every summer activity costs money, but she stumbles on drama one day when a receptionist walks out of the building. There's some issue with spending beach days in a cold room, apparently, but it sounds perfect to Alison. The director who interviews her does so with one eye and one ear trained on laptop, cellphone, and couldn't sound less interested.
Alison is well-versed in being whatever someone wants her to be, so she adds some extra pep to her voice and gives the woman her brightest smile. It feels like a grimace and she wonders if she sounds peppy to the point of psychotic, but she gets the job and starts right away.
Her birthday – seventeen today – is spent demonstrating that she can in fact type and understands that she isn't supposed to answer the phone with "yeah?"
She breaks two nails and studies the computer program she needs to use until the numbers all swim together, but this is a steady three-month job and maybe she'll be able to shift to a new motel by October. If she plays it right, she can use her fake driver's licence to get a bank account.
That night she buys a bottle of red nail polish, the candy-apple reddest she can find, and paints all twenty nails with it. Thinks screw you to Mona, and reminds herself that even if she's dead, she's not confined to a small room with drugs and nurses keeping an eye on her.
(no-one is keeping an eye on her though, they don't know she's alive to do so)
0o0o0o0
On the fifth day of working, she finds that there is a weekend seminar running. She coaxes her boss to extract the cost from her wages at a staff discount and attends diligently, pulls her best college-girl impression. It's getting easier to do because now she's seventeen, supposed to be twenty, and her fake birthday has been and gone.
(she made her fake birthday three years and eleven days before her real one. different month but still easier to remember)
Every Saturday morning she gets up, dresses in boring tops and faded jeans, and sometimes smears on makeup. She's re-dyed her hair, and the fresh harsh black of it makes her look even more washed out. Without makeup, she's already half unrecognizable, and she hates being a dull girl with no fashion style.
(she hates the thought of really dying even more, and so she stays with it)
When it's her turn to speak, she introduces herself as "Claire, but call me Clara" no one flinches, and she counts off the looks of confusion she receives.
It works. By the end of the day most people are calling her "Claire-Clara" as if the two are interchangeable, and for all she knows, they are. She doesn't care either way, she didn't come here to make friends.
It's not long before she has a routine set up, and it's both comforting and loathsome. Routine is how people can catch you out, it's how she used to be so predictable that she could come home from being out and find lipstick messages on her bedroom mirror.
Still, it feels nice being able to unwind slightly. Her shoulders don't feel quite so tense unless she's typing, a quick pitter-patter of the keys as her boss hovers in the doorway. Theoretically, it's so Alison can recite verbal reports as they process transactions or update on class attendance.
Less theoretically, it's so she can make sure there's no slacking off – Alison is nothing if not skilled at manipulation though, and she trims her nails as short as she can bear to make them, "makes it easier to type," she claims. For two long weeks she drags out lunches in the breakroom, with a stopwatch on to make sure she's back five minutes early, and she makes sure printouts are on the woman's desk before they're even needed.
On the third week the woman is satisfied that she has a proper work ethic and leaves her to it. She's free to use her work email address to sign up for local news and bus passes, uses it to get discount notifications at the thrift shop down the road from the motel and fills a wallet with frequent customer cards.
It feels like the discount version of her old life. She learns to keep a budget and buys the cheapest plan she can find to keep the burner phone going, hires a bicycle with a short-term rate and learns to fix a tyre the first time it blows out.
Other people steer clear, looking briefly at her, registering the book in her hands before they veer away.
She's Claire, and forgetting who Alison ever was.