Free Bird || outer banks ||

Where'd All The Time Go?

CLAIRE WILSON was a nervous fidgeter. She was an excited fidgeter. A bored fidgeter. Basically, anytime you laid eyes on Claire, she was twitching or moving or shaking in some way. Some may blame it on ADHD, but really, staying hopped up on coffee didn't help.

"Claire, sit still, you're making me a nervous wreck."

"Sorry, Dad."

Henry Wilson M.D. was his title for most people, but to Claire and her older brother, Noah, he was just Dad.

For as long as Claire could remember, her summers were spent in Outer Banks, North Carolina. They would fly down from New York to visit her mother's hometown and spend two months.

Claire turned her head to look out of the window of the airplane, calming herself down. To say that the blonde was excited to get back would be an understatement. She shifted her head back down to her phone and swiped through the photos she had with her friends. She paused on one of the group that was taken last summer, with her perched on the back of one John B. Routledge. Next to them was Kiara Carrera, the other girl of the group of Pogues, as they were so graciously named, JJ Maybank, and Pope Heyward.

Kiara, or Kie, was the very first of the Pogues that Claire had met, when they were both around thirteen years old. Claire's mother, Sarah, brought her to town to run errands, and they stopped for lunch at The Wreck, the restaurant that Kie's parents owned. It wasn't the first time they'd ever gone to the tourist trap for lunch, but it was the first time Kie was bussing tables.

It wasn't common that new faces came around the OBX—even if it was far from their first time around—so Kie wasted no time introducing herself. After that, the pair were all but inseparable.

Not too long following their meeting, Claire was introduced to the troublemaker, JJ, the brainiac Pope, and the smooth talker that, even at thirteen, was John B Routledge.

John B was something special, in Claire's eyes. He quickly became Claire's go-to person, and she, his.

The night that his father, Big John's, disappearance was made known, he snuck into Claire's room, confessing his fears. DCS was bound to create a case, and the last thing he wanted was to be dragged away from his home.

And then Claire's mother disappeared.

Nothing to her felt right about the entire situation, but any and every counselor that her father hired told her the same thing: move on. The only ones that didn't push her was her brother and her friends. Specifically, John B. He knew exactly what she was going through. He'd hold her day in and day out while she cried out of belief that her mother was, in fact, dead. In the midst of the darkest point in her short life, John B Routledge gave her a small ray of hope, that maybe, just maybe, her mother was out there somewhere.

It had been almost a year since the disappearance of both Big John and her mother, and the first time the Wilson's have shown their face in town. This time, though, the move was permanent. Sarah wanted her children to be raised in Outer Banks, just as she was, but she knew that it was unrealistic to ask her husband to uproot his entire practice and move south. Henry took it upon himself, however, to do so. In his eyes, it was the only way to honor his wife's memory.

Sarah was destined to be an explorer. That was the only reason she ended up in New York in the first place and met the future father of her kids. Outer Banks was her happy place. It was always crazy to Claire that she'd never met John B earlier, because Sarah and Big John were in business together. Claire always assumed it was because her father didn't want her or Noah to have any associations with those from The Cut-- AKA, the Brooklyn of the Outer Banks. AAKA, where their mother grew up. One could imagine his dismay, when he discovered his daughter was now one of the Pogues who occupied The Cut.