eerieindiana | Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: DST2

Eerie lay blanketed in grey fog, the street lamps and the rectangles of light from people’s homes creating a golden nimbus that glittered and shone from beneath the heavy haze. Cars passed, gleaming beacons of sodium orange cutting through the murk, and the neon sign for the World o’ Stuff blinked steadily, on and off, on and off.

Stood on a high bluff just beyond the city limits, looking down at the houses spread below her like a blanket studded with stars, Janet Donner shivered. She checked her watch. Forty minutes to first midnight.

Marshall stepped up behind her, the click and rattle of a dozen weirdness-combating charms signalling his every move.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said. “We can just stay here, wait it out 'til morning.”

Janet shook her head, her red hair whipping back and forth across her face in the cold November wind.

“No,” she said. “If I don’t go back now, I’ll spend the next year terrified every time someone in Aviator sunglasses looks my way.” She turned to him, and smiled. “Thanks for being with me on this.”

Marshall returned her grin with one of his own, and she reached out to take his hand. Their fingers were blue-tinged and numb with cold, and it resulted in a moment of clumsy entanglement that made them both laugh.

Marshall tucked their clasped hands into his jacket pocket, and Janet laughed again, leaning against him, feeling the warmth of his body seep through his old army-green coat.

“You’re such a dork,” she muttered, taking strange comfort in the fact. Even so many years later, after so much had changed, and he was still such a dork.

She left her hand there, gripped tight in his, among the discarded candy wrappers and forgotten salt sachets that filled his pocket. They picked their way carefully down the slope, hand in hand, as the clock crept closer to first midnight and in the distance, the bright high-beams of garbage trucks began to shine.

Janet

A Ghost in Pink by