Lost and Found

By: Jackie & Athena13

Prologue

Robin stood on the docks of Port Charles staring out over the churning waters, her hands hidden in the depths of the pocket of her black wool coat. The first place she had gone after leaving Patrick at the MetroCourt with Noah was the hospital. Within minutes after tossing her purse into her locker she had an armload of patient files filling her arms. Her armor.

Robin sighed, a puff of breath floating into the air in front of her. Watching it disappear she felt no more real than the visible breath breaking up into the atmosphere. Her dinner with Patrick had left her more emotionally bare than she had anticipated.

Robin sighed again and looked up at the startlingly clear sky. Out of long habit she searched out Orion, then her beloved Pleiades and all the other constellations that stuck in her memory from when her father used to point them out and tell her the heroic tales of old. Sometimes she still wondered why Robert Scorpio, hero of the world, didn't have his own constellation. Tendrils of her conversation with Liz from earlier in the evening drifted through her consciousness. How could the life of the daughter of Robert and Anna be so dull? If anyone should be the Devane-Scorpio child it was Patrick Drake she admitted with a rueful twist of her lips.

Sitting across from him at the MetroCourt she finally realized what it was about Patrick that had drawn her in from the moment she had met him, aside from his self-acknowledged good looks. He reminded her of her father, Sean and Luke - that boundless energy, the need to play with fire and the indefatigable confidence. With her guard down she was helpless to resist them, to pretend she wasn't attracted. That she didn't understand him. Noah's unexpected appearance had saved her and she had rushed right back to the hospital to try and build her guard back up. Problem was it wasn't working.

Damn it all to hell, but she had been looking forward to her date with Patrick and it had scared the hell out of her once she was sitting across from him. She could feel the tears burning the back of her throat as she told him he could go back to chasing after her next conquest tomorrow and leave her the hell alone. And did the man tell her he wouldn't be back to playing those games? Nope, instead he had challenged her to allow herself to have a good time and she had agreed, never contemplating where that would leave her at the end of the night.

The last time she had felt this churned up she had been looking out over the Seine, the sounds of the houseboat party her friend Maxime had dragged her to joyously sounding out behind her. Happy voices and happy music fueled by lots of wine, so in conflict with how she was feeling with the latest jilting burning heavily in her breast and visions of the note he had left still lying crumpled on the floor of the kitchen flashing before her eyes. He had left it near the coffee maker to make sure she would find it when she came home that morning from spending the night at the lab watching over an experiment.

Been fun. Back to Geneva. I'll miss you.

That night she had made a vow that she would not get caught up in the emotional pain and distraction of romance, telling herself that she'd had two big loves in her life already and what more could she really expect anyway? With HIV it was just too difficult, time and again she had to steel herself to tell and more often than not attraction would turn to repulsion before her eyes. When it didn't, it all eventually ended anyway. She had come to the conclusion that she just didn't have the capacity to love like she had Stone and Jason again and she was just wasting time and energy she could spend on her research.

Now, over a year later she was staring at a different body of water facing another life-altering decision. It was time to start living again.

Whatever that meant. Whoever that meant.