Author's Note:
Thanks to everyone who voted on the first chapter of this story. Once again, this story has no actual sex. Next chapter, I promise. The first chapter was something of a teaser, a look at the future these two characters have and now I'm stepping back to write how they got that way. This story will bounce somewhat between their two perspectives and lives as they ebb and flow with eachother.
Thank you again for putting up with the slower chapters that will be used for building the characters and I'll be sure to pepper in enough romance to at least keep it interesting.
-----
It's mid-June and the sun is blindingly hot in the sky as Sharyn nears the outskirts of New Orleans. She's been on the road for months and it shows in the weight of the worn backpack on her shoulders, the holes in her jeans, and the wear on the end of the staff she's used to walk when she could no longer run. Despite the humidity of the southern swamps, it has been a fine day and she has not been on the road so long that her journey begins to wear. She set out from Ohio in the early chill of fall when her home was no longer afforded her. Even now, as she runs along the roadside, she knows not where her feet are taking her, only that she still has a ways to go. Certainly, she knows not what will develop not quite two years from now.
For now, she is young, just turned eighteen. Scrawny from a lack of proper food, but there's a sparkle in her eye as her feet tread surely against the pavement. A sparkle that turns to a startled yell when she treads wrong, her foot catching the edge of a cracked bit of pavement and upsetting her mid-stride and sending her toppling to the pavement. It takes a few moments to regain her breath and once she does all there is at first is a soft, "Ow."
The aches of scraped palms and arm are barely registering beyond the painful firing of her synapses, panickedly reporting the state of the ankle. She rolls carefully onto the less injured side, tears springing to her eyes as she tries to rotate that ankle. It isn't broken, but moving it even a little is painful. Her fingers claw against the pavement, reaching for her staff fallen just out of reach. One doesn't walk this far, though, to be stopped by a turned ankle, and she closes her eyes, gritting her teeth as she drags already screaming flesh against the rough pavement until she rolls face first into the grass beside the highway and lays there for a long moment, again having to catch her breath before she can continue.
Finally, her fingers wrap around the smooth oak brand, well worn from use and her own attentions and she pulls herself to her feet, leaning heavily on the stout wood to avoid putting weight on the injured ankle. Having grown up on a farm, it's hardly her first sprain, but now the dark outlines of New Orleans' skylines shimmering in the heat seem impossibly far and she's coated in a thin sheen of sweat by the time she moves from the outskirts into the tighter streets of the older inner city.
She is, at least, blessed that the streets are not full, it being just past the average lunch hour and far enough after Mardi Gras to be lacking in tourists. It doesn't make the stilting path any easier along old, worn and cracked sidewalks. One busker is, at least, nice enough to point her in the direction of the nearest clinic that accepts walk ins for a reasonable price and she repays him with a few bills from her pocket before limping along her way.
Caillis Clinic looks a decidedly odd place, nestled in as it is along Decatur Street between a small curio shop on one side and a two-story apartment on the other. Little does she know as she reaches to open the plain glass door into the small clinic, just how profound an effect it will have on her life.
Stepping into the clinic is almost like stepping back in time. Despite the modern storefront with Dr. Sean MacHough and the hours marked out in clear white letters on the glass door, the interior is without electrical devices or, really, any modern contrivance of medicine. Gas flames flicker along the walls of the softly pointed lobby with it's comfortable chairs and a plain wooden desk stained a deep oak protecting the files of patient records against the far wall. Only one hallway stretches back into the clinic, two exam rooms and a storage space.
