I still don't own anything.

Two Years

She awakes in a motel room, her head hurting and the faintly musty scent of the room permeating the air.

The night's events return in bits and pieces… her mother burying her alive, the hit to the back of the head, Spencer and pills and blackmail and Ezra.

Mona looks at her through the mirror, indicates the piles of shopping bags and she's worried that Mona bought too much. Further inspection reveals two medium bags and some generic clothes, hair dye and a few basic cosmetics. The gratitude she feels is almost overwhelming, here is someone she can trust and she remembers a damp washcloth being brushed over her face.

And so she perches on the edge of the bathtub, her neck protected with a thin, worn-out towel as Mona applies the chemically-fruity dye. They don't speak, and her hair is pinned on top of her head while the dye works.

"Thank you," breaks the silence, and Mona gives a vague half-smile in response.

She stands in the shower while black water runs over her body and stains her fingernails and feels nothing like Alison DiLaurentis.

There's a car waiting out front of the lodge for her, and she carries out her meagre belongings and piles them in the passenger seat, adjusts the mirror. The car is shabby and not hers, and it's the first time she has ever gone somewhere with less than two suitcases of luggage. She has no idea where she's going, and so she presses the pedal down and steers away from Rosewood.

0o0o0o0

Three hours later she's made her way over somewhere near New York, or at least she thinks she has. Reflexively, she goes to check her phone, only to remember it's gone. Too useful as a tracking tool, Mona had said, so she'd crushed the SIM card beneath her high heel, ripped out the battery and battered the casing. She's technology-free, except for the car.

Instead, she reaches into the smaller of the two bags, rifles through with shaky hands. The cash is still there and she slowly counts out each note. It's a little over a thousand, and she doesn't want to know how Mona got hold of it.

The car is going to get low on gas, and then she'll have to top it up. It's too pricey, she can't use credit cards here or ring home for help.

Pulling the sleeve of her jacket over her hand, she opens the door and steps out with her bags, wipes the steering wheel as best she can, checks for anything that might incriminate her and walks off.

Thirty metres, forty, fifty… she walks and regrets not getting sustenance for the drive. Two hundred metres and she reaches a busier, more public area.

She sticks out her thumb.

0o0o0o0

On the run, that's what this is called. Only there's a surprising lack of running involved. She slips into another cheap and battered car, this one driven by a college girl and lies about everything. The girl is sweet and a bit nervous, clearly recognizing her as a popular type.

They stop for coffee and she takes the polystyrene cup, snags her things from the backseat and vanishes into a crowd.

She can't stop to look back, though she wants to pause and thank the girl for her help, give her advice like she'd given Mona advice, but if she falters then she won't be safe. It's better to be the one who disappears, better to be mystery girl than runaway girl.

The coffee burns her mouth, tastes bitter on her tongue but she drinks it slowly, tells herself it isn't so bad. It's a lie of course, but the basis in a lie is in believing it yourself, and so she repeats this little mantra every time she takes a sip. She doesn't know where the next one will come from, doesn't have the money to dole out on good coffees and for some reason she can't quite fathom, makes the coffee last. Maybe it'd be better to down it all, but then again she has to get used to drinking average drinks. There's not much space for designer food here – it's just the basics.

There's a bus station ahead and she hops on the next bus available, cringes internally at the fare that will take her a few cities away, and curls up in the universal don't-come-near way of bags beside her and an out-the-window gaze.

The cityscapes meld one into another, tall buildings and jungles of steel, concrete and windows.

She is free, but trapped: she is supposed to be dead, saw the horror on her mother's face when she was hit over the head with the rock and she knows she wasn't meant to survive.

0o0o0o0

Departing the bus is painless and vanishing into the crowds is made easy by the fact that the station is busy, families greeting each other and sending people off, lovers kissing and friends hugging. She is not the only one alone here though, there were a handful of loner nomads. She's fine – the dark wig makes her look older, the loner nomads mean she doesn't stand out because she's alone and so she pretends to be a travelling student. From her vantage point at the back of the bus, she saw every person boarding or disembarking, and by the time the journey is over she has several pages of her journal filled with character ideas and descriptions. Some were alone, and so she can be secure in the knowledge that solo travellers are not unusual to this city.

(Which city? She isn't sure, but there's a motel up the street)

Rooms are cheap, and she marvels silently at just how low the cost is. A few minutes later her elation turns to dismay: the room is grimy, as though it's seen a dozen conventions and never was cleaned properly. The bed squeaks when she puts her bag on it, and the desk chair has one leg slightly shorter than the others. The bathroom has a fine layer of dust and she's half-tempted to grab a towel and begin scrubbing, but none of that matters. It's a functional room, somewhere to stay for a few nights while she gets her bearings, and no-one said she had to sleep in the bed.

There's a small grocery store a few streets over, and she circles the aisles in confusion. The motel doesn't do room service, apparently, just provides a tiny kitchenette and space for her to cook. There are coffee packets and tea bags, sugar packets and that's the most of their domesticity.

Seems you get what you pay for, she muses as she picks up some crisps, a loaf of bread and some butter. This is bewildering territory for a girl who is used to finding food in the cupboards or straight from the fridge – at a stretch, she might have had to wait in a restaurant – but having to do her own food-shopping is completely new.

The clerk is sullen and does not make conversation through the transaction, scanning through each item and dumping it into a plastic bag. It doesn't surprise her though, already she is adapting to the silence of the city and the lack of friendliness it offers. Besides, lack of conversation with others is preferable – less opportunity to slip up and say something, less chance that someone will misinterpret her words.

Back in the motel she prepares a sandwich, takes a cookie from the bag and calls it dinner.

(God she misses home)

0o0o0o0

For a dead girl she manages to be active.

In cafes she drinks free tap water, flirts with cute boys (and the occasional girl because she's in no position to be fussy) and they buy her food. She picks salads and sandwiches and filled rolls, whatever she can get away with because it makes her own sad stash of food last longer and it's free.

Sometimes she makes token gestures to pay, gets as far as drawing her wallet from her bag before her companion waves her off, goes to the cash register. After the first few days she learns the trick of disappearing before they come back, returning to the motel triumphant in her success.

Soon she learns the value of walking further afield, places herself in a theatre or somewhere cheap to hang out. Some days she buys a book cheap from a thrift store, reads it in the park and before she knows it someone is asking her out for dinner. She gives fake addresses and masters buying dresses, leaving the tags on, and returning them for some made-up reason.

0o0o0o0

It becomes a cycle. Find a bus station, get the next bus out of the city and then spend a week coaxing free meals out of people.

She regrets nothing, because she didn't regret all the times she was a bitch to her friends and she can't bring herself to care for people now because they're just a means to an end. Just because she's fleeing for her life, doesn't mean she has to starve, and so she invests in a pair of reading glasses – the lenses are actually just plain glass, but they're convincing and with them she looks different enough that someone might do a double-take if they saw her.

At night she doesn't sleep, but stays up reading or watching TV on a crappy old monitor, sometimes falling into a light doze supplemented by caffeine. She hasn't truly rested in weeks now, has bags under her eyes and she's sure her face is thinner.

Turns out the temporary dye was too stubborn to fade out properly – she thinks about how long it took to fade off her thumb, where some had been splotched – and it'd just turned a kind of ashy gray over her hair, no thanks to the cheap generic hair care she's using. She takes a bottle of dye to her hair, permanent this time, and decides to let it grow out. Blonde, she is too recognizable, and she remembers seeing herself on a milk carton when she was stocking up on motel food.

(This is a far cry from what she had in mind when she imagined running to Paris with Emily)

She's brushing her hair for something to do when she tires of the black colour after two weeks: long enough that she stops doing a double-take, but it's boring. This is the part where she'd go to a salon, have the colour stripped and restored to her natural blonde, but she can't. Instead, she grits her teeth and drags the brush through again.

She can't take the risks – every time she sees a police officer, or any kind of law enforcer she's convinced that they recognize the girl hiding under the black hair. Sometimes, in the middle of an afternoon she's convinced that someone recognizes her, that someone will call her out and so she flees to another city.

Plays dead for a while and moves on.

It gets to the point where she carries a few pre-packaged foods in her bag, shrink-wrapped and likely to last until the apocalypse. It's the best way to carry food, dairy goods wouldn't survive multiple bus and train journeys.

0o0o0o0

The cities have begun to blur together. They all look the same, now she's used to being on the go.

There's always a town hall, always a museum named for the city and maybe an art gallery nearby. There are cafes all over the place, more bus stops than she cares to count and she makes it a priority to have someone else find out what buses will take her out of town if she needs.

(It makes her feel like her old self, having someone else do things for her, and anyway, it's a happy bonus that she won't leave online tracks from signing in to a website)

She's been moving for six weeks now, and it feels like a lifetime. Time is blurring around the edges, she forgets too easily what the day is and she wonders if this is the beginning of madness creeping in.

Days unfold into nights, or maybe they fold – she can't tell and doesn't care to know the difference.

This is hopeless, she decides one night. She's somewhere near a beach and she wants nothing more than to go home, or go to the beach and eat ice-cream.

Problem is, she also wants to survive. Going home would only make A furious that she wasn't dead, would only raise questions she couldn't answer.

The money Mona gave her is running out, but she ruffles the banknotes and separates each denomination, laying each note on the pages of her journal. Counting her money makes her nervous now, she's always convinced that she'll not have enough and then she really will be trapped. For all that she thinks she's trapped, she's okay as long as she has money for food and shelter.

Once again, she's lucky: it's enough for a cheap bus ticket and a motel. A bus leaves in fifteen minutes, and it's the last one for the week – maybe she can persuade someone to give her a discount.

Time to keep surviving.