Chapter Text
Claire
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Claire was Alandra, Alandra was Claire.
Alandra was Claire, Claire was Alandra.
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Claire was dead, crushed in a head-on collision coming home from the grocery store, though it would be a long time before she understood that.
There was something sticky covering her whole body and her arms and legs wouldn’t move and her eyes wouldn’t open- and why couldn’t she stop screaming damn it?
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The screaming had ended, she thinks. Hopes. There’s no pain anymore, just a dull ache and a faint pounding in the back of her head.
There are noises all around her but she couldn’t make out the words for the life of her. The people speaking were doctors she realizes, and she must be just waking up. Had they been performing surgery on her earlier? Is that what that was? Had some anesthesia they had given her worn off partway through?
Maybe she could sue whatever hospital she was in for negligence. Get a fat check out of this shitstorm and have something to actually be grateful for.
Except for being alive, she figured. She should be pretty grateful for that, or at least she would be when she could finally wake up.
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The ache was back after some time, god knows how long it had been really. The noises were back too, and there were things touching her. Poking and prodding at her. She wanted to slap whatever was touching her away, crawl back into the soft blankets she had been in and sleep in peace.
She was back in surgery again, she figured. How many times could they possibly operate on her?
The minivan that collided with their car had been hurdling down the street at a pretty good speed. Maybe she had cracked her skull open and they were chiseling it back together. Hah. Chiseling her head. Now that was a funny thought.
Seriously though, what the fuck were they doing to her?
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Ultimately, she'd decided that she was in a coma. That’s technically not a choice anyone decides per se, but for the sake of her sanity, Claire had decided that she was in a coma.
She had better fucking wake up soon.
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This was a shit coma. She wanted food. Sooo badly.
That had been another not-decision of hers. She wanted food, and she was getting desperate. Literally anything would be better than the nothing that she was consuming right now. Her throat was parched like the Sahara Desert, too. If Claire’s need for food was immense, her need for water was astronomical.
Wait… how was she still alive if she wasn’t eating or drinking?
An IV line, she realized.
Honestly, fuck IV lines and whoever invented them. If no IV lines existed, surely they would’ve woken her up by now so she could ingest something.
She would take anything at this point. Kale in all of its disgusting vegetable or chip forms. The awful meatloaf Mrs. Denise from down the street made whenever they had neighborhood potlucks. Her grandma’s abomination of a lemonade recipe that was always a one-way trip to Diabetes Central. Unfermented, expired eggnog. Ugh.
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It took a while for it to sink in what had happened. She had started to get back her vision, and what she could make out were very large shapes. As they began to get more defined, she discovered that those were the people. The most prominent was one young woman in particular. And she was Claire’s mother.
She had discovered that on a nice day when she’d been brought close to an open window, and when she’d subconsciously started to fuss in an attempt to get closer to the cool, fresh air, a nipple had been stuck straight into her mouth. A freaking nipple.
Some of her questions had been answered that day, and at the same time, she had gained about a gazillion more. Most of her internal thoughts were centered around the fact that the only way for her to gain nutrition and get rid of the parched feeling in her throat was to suck on a woman’s goddamn tit.
She didn’t want to suck on a tit, thank you very much. It was humiliating and degrading, and Claire was thankful that no one knew that she knew what was going on. God that would be horribly awkward if they did.
Claire was going insane. That was really the only explanation that she could accept. She was dead. This was the afterlife, heaven or hell, it honestly didn’t matter which in this case. Regardless, she was in the afterlife, and this was either a very fucked up type of eternal torture or she was going insane. She hadn’t gone to church in a while, she realized.
It had probably been about three or four months since she had last gone. One of the old women who she’d never liked had asked if she was ‘sure that such a quick wedding isn’t to cover something up’, looking very pointedly at her midsection.
Old Lonnie had always been a bitch, and an almond mom, Claire realized. God her kids must’ve had it awful. Or her daughters at least. She’d made a pointed effort to work out after that and hadn’t wanted to go anywhere near Old Lonnie after she had run into her at the grocery store and the old bitch just stared at the oversized hoodie she had worn.
Screw that old woman honestly. It was unnaturally cold that day and she had done laundry since it was a Saturday and it was a really comfortable hoodie of Michael’s that she had always loved and-
Michael. She’d forgotten about Michael. In all the chaos of her existential crisis, she’d forgotten about Michael.
Michael who was her first and only love.
Michael who took her to Canada to meet his parents and had declared to his entire family when they somehow all showed up that she was the woman he was going to marry.
Michael who painted the walls of their first apartment with her and initiated a paint war that nearly ruined all their hard work when he tripped over a can of black paint and spilled it all over the floor.
Michael who proposed to her on a Thursday evening when she’d made his favorite comfort spaghetti as a surprise for dinner because she knew he’d had a bad day at work.
Michael who promised her the world and a life of happiness.
Michael who was in the car with her when the mini-van collided with it.
Was he going through the same thing as her? Was he going crazy like her at whatever the hell this was? Had he thought of her yet? Had he remembered her?
She didn’t want to know, she realized. It would be better to live a lifetime of self-reassurance that he did remember everything about her rather than not.
Maybe this was hell. Maybe this was the torture. Losing the best part of your life and knowing that it has no knowledge of you. It was a good torture method.
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She’d been crying softly for hours and her mother-not-mother hadn’t been able to console her at all. There was another person that was around a lot. He had a deep voice and was constantly around her mother so she figured he was her father.
It turned out to be right, and she saw a lot more of him. Eventually, though, she’d forced herself to stop crying because she was scaring her not-mother to pieces. The poor woman was taking her from person to person to figure out what was wrong and why she was crying non-stop, but no one was able to shut Claire up.
When not-mother had started crying along with her, literally day and night, she had finally stopped. That made not-mother a million times happier, and she’d started humming little songs at her and taking her to the windows more often.
She was a smart woman, and when Claire had been a lot happier when the windows were open and the sun was on her face, she’d caught on.
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Most of her days now were spent in a quiet daze, lolling around and trying to gain control of her limbs. Not-mother apparently found it endlessly amusing, but it was rather clear that Claire was her first baby, because she was enraptured by everything she did. That, and the fact that she was never gone.
Not-father was gone most of the time, but not-mother was always there with her, never even away to take care of another child, and it gave her a sense of comfort that she’d at least be well cared for in purgatory.
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To ensure her continued sanity, Claire had started to build out a working map in her mind. She used it to track her surroundings and mark her discoveries. So far, there were no discoveries, she had let her imagination run wild.
She was somewhere warm and breezy, so she imagined she was living in Europe. Her not-mother stayed at home to take care of her, but she never actually saw her doing any housework. Either they had a maid, or they lived with family. Maybe her not-mother’s or not-father’s mother had come to help not-mother with the pregnancy and was still around.
Her not-father was a busy man, so Claire imagined that he was a banker or a real estate agent. It helped every day to think of these things, but one day, it all finally made sense to her.