Blame

Home

It took a couple of minutes for Elizabeth to successfully regain the strength to continue walking.

She bent down to pick her bag up (which she had dropped when she was shoved). The very moment that it left the ground, the duct tape covered bottom split open, spilling the contents out.

Sighing to herself, she swung one of the empty bag's straps over her shoulder before gathering all of her stuff into her arms.

It usually took Elizabeth about twelve minutes to walk from school to home, but she couldn't really bring herself to move all that fast so it instead took her twenty.

She went through the gap in between a couple of derelict buildings and crossed the crumbling stretch of parking lot behind them. There was a metal fence at the opposite end. She tossed her stuff over it before hooking her fingers onto the chain links, sticking the front of her foot into one of the gaps, and pulling herself up.

Due to her sudden lack of coordination, the redhead stumbled a bit upon landing. The short climb hurt way worse than walking did, but it was worth all of the extra time it shaved off of her journey. 

After regathering her stuff, she went across the dead-end street that greeted her, through the old park (which was completely empty), and around a vacant lot.

Okay, the lot wasn't actually vacant. But it usually was.

Apparently, sometime after Elizabeth had left in the morning, a large circus tent had been set up.

People were yelling.

"Elizabeth!"

"Y-yes, Mister Afton?"

"Could you move that banner on your left over about a foot?"

Elizabeth pulled the pole up out of the ground, moving it over.

She was slowly becoming more anxious with every passing minute.

"No, no. The other direction!"

Elizabeth was going to grab Jesse the very moment that the troupe was finished setting up. She was going to grab her and drag her to the nearest payphone, call Charlie, and listen to what she had to say.

She was prepared for whatever information/instructions that the brunette was going to dump onto her.

But at the same time, she wasn't at all.

"Yes, right there. Perfect!"

She planted the pole back into the ground, looking around to see what else needed to be done.

Not much, it seemed...

"Alright, we're set and ready to go. You all can have a fifteen-minute break before we begin rehearsal."

It was time.

That was her cue to leave. 

" -- you can't quit, Flynn!"

"I just did!"

"What am I going to do without you? You're my only knife thrower!"

Even though Elizabeth automatically began to block the voices out, she still turned to look at whoever was arguing as she passed by.

One appeared to be a rather young man, a mop of dark red hair on his head and an eyepatch over one eye. He was walking away, much to the dismay of the older guy, who was rather gaunt with stringy brown hair.

The last sentence that she heard before everything faded out continued to echo through her head for some reason.

It echoed up until the moment she was finally on the front porch of the house she lived in.

The sound of her parents arguing about something or another was audible from outside. She wasn't all that surprised.

She dug around her pockets for her key, but couldn't find it.

Rather than interrupt whatever was transpiring inside by loudly knocking on the door, Elizabeth decided to walk around back. The lock on the sliding glass door was broken, so she could get in that way.

She dragged her fingertips across the house's faded bricks as she made her way over.

Quietly, she slid the door open. The voices inside did not get any louder as she did so. Instead, they grew quieter as Elizabeth began to tune them out, reducing them to nothing but a dull hum.

She attempted to kick the dirt off of her shoes and brush some of it off of her clothes before stepping inside.

 Just as quietly, the redhead made her way upstairs, managing to remain unnoticed.

She cleaned herself up and patched up whatever she could.

Because it didn't seem like the house was going to enter a state of noiselessness any time soon, Elizabeth hastily made her way back downstairs and out the back door once she was done, no particular destination in mind.