Fandom: Rule of Rose
Pairing: Clara/Diana
Summary: Clara takes a strange bus to an even stranger town.
Sugar Sugar Sugar
That man is bad
The road he drives you down
O sugar it’s a drag
That road it twists
That road is crossed
It’s down that road
A lot of little girls go lost
– “Sugar Sugar Sugar” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
The ache in her side hurt entirely too much to be merely from running; surely, she thought, in between ragged, gasping breaths, and desperate gulps of icy air, she’d been stabbed in the chaos?
Lifting her damp shirt, however, revealed only smooth skin and little constellations of bruises and scabbed chains of scratches.
Some new, some…
She smoothed the fabric back down with unsteady hands.
No blood, at least, and here in the near-dark, amidst the cracked pavement and the broken glass, and the phantom moan of the calliope bleeding through the silence, that would have to do.
Something like relief (but not quite, and not now, and maybe she wouldn’t recognize it even if it did come) unfurled inside of her, and she found herself slumping back against the wall, back against the chipped brick and the frayed rope, and the stained and tattered brown cloth that stretched and draped from building to building. A wet, strangled sound gurgled up in her throat, ghostly, broken laughter as she waited for her legs to stop trembling, fear peeling back to reveal the black core of exhaustion that pulsed within her like a second heart.
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white claudia 