Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Jogging

[froodle]

In the pre-dawn darkness, Janet Donner is running.

She's wearing a backpack containing a fully-charged cellular phone, a reflective hi-vis jacket, and a battery-operated bicycle lamp pinned to the front of her coat, The yellow beam bounces against the sidewalk as she runs. She's not wearing headphones, not carrying a walkman, and she can hear the slap of her feet on the tarmac'd ground, her own steady breathing, and the bump and rustle of the sandwiches she's taken with her, just in case.

In the distance, there's the clink of glass bottles being placed gently on the doorsteps of sleeping households and the soft purr of the milk truck's engine.

It's been six months since she returned to her family, escaping from whatever strange time-slip or pocket-dimension she had previously occupied. Sometimes she gets the year wrong on the top of her homework assignments, and her teachers look at her with pity and concern, and her mother gets phone calls that have her crying in the kitchen when Janet gets home from school. Sometimes, when she changes for gym or pulls a heavy textbook from her schoolbag, people ask why she keeps a shrimping net in there, and Janet can't bring herself to explain that she's simply looking out for any terminally naive idiots with whom she might find herself sharing an empty world once again.

She carries the cell phone for her parents, so that if they wake and find her gone, they can reach her. She carries the net for Marshall Teller, and for the spirit of Jimmy Hoffa, dismembered and decomposing in that empty world's version of the Florida Everglades. She carries the sandwiches just in case, because she still doesn't know how she wound up in the otherworld to begin with, and if it happens again, she'll need to eat before she goes hunting down mysterious old milkmen to demand they put her back.

And she runs for herself, for the year she missed in so-called regular Eerie, for the year hiding in empty houses when she heard the hydraulic brakes on a garbage truck, for the year she cried on her parents bed because the smell of her mother's perfume no longer lingered. She runs because, if it happens again, she might not survive the loneliness if she's not in constant motion. She runs because there are bin-collection days three times a week in Eerie, and she can't tell the difference between a man who supports his family by emptying trash cans into a truck, and something not-a-man that keeps time and space on track by hunting down lost children and crushing them out of existence.

If they come for her again, Janet Donner will run, and never stop running, and so she sprints along the dew-wet pavements of her once-familiar hometown, feels her heart racing with the effort, and pushes herself to go faster, chasing the feeling of safety and normalcy that eludes her even in the throes of a runner's high.

Comments

[eviinsanemonkey.livejournal.com]

oh, oh Janet :(

this is brilliant but. ow.

[froodle]

My headcanon is that janet deals with that missing year by being CRAZY PREPARED at all times, like night vale girl scout levels of competency.

[deifire]

*shivers*

Ooh, nicely done! And so perfect; this is exactly how I image the return to real life would be for Janet after a year on the run in the Lost Hour.

And I can just I say, I love taking a break to find so much Eerie fic today!

[froodle]

Thank you!

I wanted to write some janet biz for a while, but i didnt have any good ideas til recently. The way i see it is, sure, yeah, she made.ot home safely,so shes doing better than steve or devon or even sara sue, but theres no way a year f thinking youre.literally the last person on earth doesnt mess you up. If janet ever has t stay late at the office and the cleaners come in, I predict things get awkward fast.

Lol iwas trying to work on the fic.masterlist but igot dostracted n then i.slired reading everyo.e elses stuff!