A/N: long time no see lovers! I know it's been eons since I've updated SR or ACH but I've just been in a bit of a rut and this story is to help me right up out of that.
WHAT SHES STARTING A NEW STORY NO F YOU UPDATE YOUR OTHER STORIES
I hear you angry villagers, trust me I do. And reading this will probably just make you want to kill me more, but I promise, good things come to those who don't kill me. I love you all and hope you enjoy this. It's only going to be about 3 chapters long. And I'll be updating daily (or every other day). Oh and if you want to be super best friends, my tumblr url is newterrains, I post drabbles and one shots there occasionally, and you can come yell at me in my ask box if you want. It'll be fun. xoxoxo
Here is Gone - Part 1
I couldn't do it exactly a year afterward. That would be too obvious. So I had to wait longer. But the year mark is what kept me going. When my body felt so heavy I was certain one more step would shatter me into a thousand pieces, I would close my eyes and remind myself: just one year. One Year. Not that much longer now. Not that much longer at all. I don't know how long it's been since it happened. Over a year. Any day now, I'm going to do it. Any day. Maybe next week. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe today. The memory of what happened that day hits me like a slap. I don't want to remember. But I need to remember. It's all I have left.
"Ah, here she is." a familiar voice sloshed through my ears. My eyelids felt like lead weights. I blinked painfully as my memories came rushing back to me. Zoe. The Alchemists. Stanton. They knew.
"Whatever you do won't change me you know," I told her bitterly. "I'm not afraid of pain. I'm not afraid to die."
She laughed. And not a sick, movie villain, we've got you now laugh. But an actual, normal, amused laugh.
"Oh, Sydney. Really." Donna Stanton shook her head at me. "I never knew you to be so dramatic."
"You never knew me at all," I spat.
"I know you better than you think," was her even reply. "And you know nothing at all."
I scoffed loudly. "I know I'm in re-education. That much is obvious."
"Wrong again," she said, the corner of her mouth turning upward ever so slightly.
That.
Was unexpected.
"I..." I look around the all white no windowed room we're in. "Where am I?"
"It's not of consequence."
I rolled my eyes. "Of course not."
She gave me a long appraising look. Finally, she leaned in close to me and said, "I had such high hopes for you. You were..." she paused, almost looking a little sad. "You are one of the best we've got."
"Had," I corrected.
She clasped her hands together, ignoring my interjection. You were always such a smart girl. So level-headed. I never thought we'd be having this conversation, Sydney, I really didn't."
I sighed heavily and my chest heaved painfully against my restraints. "Let's just skip the lecture and get to the re-education part, shall we?"
Her sigh echoed my own. "Sydney, I already told you. We're not taking you to re-education."
"Then what the hell do you call this?" I struggled against the straps holding me to the dentist-like chair I was in for emphasis. It was no easy task, as I was still sluggish from the sedative they'd no doubt doped me up with. Far too weak to perform any sort of spell. Maybe that was a good thing. They may know about Adrian. And us. But they didn't know about me. I still had that.
"An intervention, of sorts." she said. "You were quite hysterical when you arrived-"
"When you dragged me here."
"Some precautions were necessary," she snapped. She was losing her patience with me. Not that I cared. I lost my patience with her, with all of them, a long time ago.
"How long did you know?" I asked coldly.
"I suspected," she leaned away from me, "for quite some time. I convinced myself it couldn't be true. No. Not Sydney Sage. Not you. But I thought, better safe than sorry, so we ran our little experiment and...unfortunately, what I suspected was true." The disappointment in her tone made me sick. I didn't give a damn what she thought about me. Not after what she'd done.
"Little experiment," I scoffed. "You mean turning my own flesh and blood against me?" Adrian and I had been so careful, especially around Zoe. Hardly even glancing at each other when she was around. And then, as I didn't find out until after all Hell had broken loose, they'd been putting pressure on her. Guilting her into following me around, spying on me, and then of course, there was a moment. A moment where it hurt too much to be careful. And Zoe saw it. I wished I could forget the way she looked at me. Like she didn't even know who I was.
"She's hardly against you, Sydney. None of us are."
"Right."
"You should be thanking me, you know. I don't even plan to tell your father about your..." she sniffed. "Indiscretion."
"You're right," I deadpanned, "Thanks a million."
"You know if it was anyone else, we would have just hauled them off to re-education without a second thought," she said darkly. "But I'm not about to have my best and brightest pulled apart and stitched back together like a rag doll."
The fervor in her voice took me by surprise. It almost sounded like genuine compassion. Almost.
"You are a smart girl, Sydney. And I know that sometimes smart girls make stupid decisions. It doesn't mean you deserve to have your entire future stripped away from you." She took a breath. "No. You don't." Her voice had a hollow, far away sound to it, and I couldn't help but notice it sounded like she was talking to herself.
"If you're not taking me to re-education," I managed to say without any malice in my voice. "Then what are you going to do to me?"
"Don't make it sound so macabre," she sighed. "Whatever your picturing in that overly romantic mind of yours...electro-shock, lobotomy..." she chuckled, "We're not going to hurt you, Sydney."
A question was scraping its way up my throat. I didn't want to know. But I had to know. "Where is he?" I swallowed the pain down. "Adrian."
She bristled at the mention of his name. "The Moroi has already been dealt with."
The sentence wrapped around my ribcage and squeezed. Dealt with.
"What does that mean?" My voice was a weapon. If they had hurt him...If they had hurt him. "Where is he?"
"I would assume he's at home, with his family." she replied airily. "His father was notified of the situation at hand after the boy had been stabilized. He was escorted from the facility this morning quickly and quietly, thank God. It seems Nathan Ivashkov is as eager to avoid a scandal as we are."
Her words were just mashed up sounds that didn't make sense. "What do you mean...stabilized? What did you do to him?"
"I think it would be unwise of me to tell you," she said, "but I refuse to do this to you, Sydney, without you knowing what's going to happen." and with that she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a tiny cylindrical thing. No bigger than a pinky finger.
"What is that?" I hissed. My stomach dropped in anticipation.
She walked over to me, holding the thing an inch from my face. It was a syringe filled with pinkish, sick looking liquid. Nausea gripped me. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know. But I had to know.
"The drug isn't fully developed yet, we certainly hadn't planned on using it on anyone any time soon, but as they say, desperate times..."
I wriggled uselessly beneath my restraints. The material of the chair squeaked loudly. "Really, you're going to use an untested drug on me? What happened to all your talk of restoring my bright future? It won't do me much good if I'm dead."
She smiled a wan, papery smile. "It's not untested, Sydney. As I just told you, our first successful test subject was escorted from the premises earlier this morning."
Everything. Stopped. My breath. My heart. The room pushed inward. Tears stung at my eyes but I refused to give her the satisfaction. I blinked. I took a breath. I blinked again. This was it. This was reality. Whatever was in the syringe was going to course through my bloodstream in mere seconds. There was nothing I could do to stop it. No spell I knew of. Maybe something to undo the straps so I could make a run for it but there was no time. I was too weak. They'd already used it on Adrian. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.
"What does it do?" I finally asked. Calm. Dead calm.
"I'm tired, Sydney." she said, which didn't answer my question. "Tired of fighting with you about this. And I know you're tired too. Let's just get this over with." She uncapped the syringe.
I was in panic mode now. I had nothing left. My only resource left wasn't a resource at all. I begged.
"Please, don't." My voice was rough. "Not-not yet. You said you'd tell me what you were going to do. But you haven't. I want to know what's going to happen to me."
"I'll tell you this," she said softly. "It will make you sleep. And when you wake up, this will all be behind you. All of it. I promise."
"What does that mean?" I exclaimed, but before the words even left my mouth, I knew. I knew what it meant. Memories. They were going to erase my memories.
As if she read my thoughts, Stanton put her hand on my arm in a gesture of comfort. I tried to jerk away to no avail. "It will not erase who you are, Sydney, if that's what you're afraid of. You'll still be you. It will just clean up all the poison that's seeped its way into your mind. Months of messy, invasive re-education aren't necessary, not for you. You don't need to be re-educated. You just need the poison sucked out. This is much cleaner, quicker, easier. It's better this way."
"By poison, you mean Adrian, right?" I couldn't stop the tears now. "And that's what you did to him? Sucked his poison out?"
"More or less," she answered, rolling up the sleeve of my shirt.
"It'll never work," I grit out through my sobs. "Not on me. And definitely not on Adrian. He'd never forget me."
She cocked her head to the side, looking at me with pitying eyes. "Sydney, my dear. He already has."
"You're lying!" I cried. "You're lying." I thrashed against the straps that held me down. They burned and rubbed against my skin.
"We wouldn't have released him if the medication hadn't worked." she said tonelessly, like she was positively exhausted. I wanted to spit in her face. "We have a video recording of his progress, for our records, if you'd like to see it. When we questioned him this morning he didn't remember a thing. You do not exist to him any longer."
The words weren't real. They couldn't be. None of this. It was all just a nightmare. I willed myself to wake up wake up wake up and when I did I'd snuggle close to Adrian, breathe him in, be safe in his arms.
"I hate you," my voice shook with rage. "You're a disgusting person."
"Be that as it may," she said wearily, "It's time for this to end."
In that moment, something sparked within me. Insanity, base survival instinct, I don't know.
"Donna," I whispered, the first time I ever addressed her by her first name. "Please. Don't do this. You can tell them you did. Tell them you gave me the drug and it worked. And I swear, I swear I'll pretend that it did. I'll do whatever you want, I'll be your good little alchemist. I won't ever, ever disobey another order. I swear. Just don't-" My voice broke, "Just please don't make me forget him. Don't take him away from me. Not in here," I feebly pointed to my head. "Not in my mind. It's all I have left. It's all I have left, please."
She looked at me strangely. Her expression a mixture of confusion, disgust, and something else. Something else I couldn't identify. She looked at me and looked at me. And then, finally, she fumbled around in her pockets, I couldn't see what she was doing.
A needle pierced my skin. I winced. The dry tears pulled against my skin. Too late. Nothing to say now. Nothing to do. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing...
"If you so much as step a toe out of line, Sydney Sage..." my vision was already blurring but I could faintly make out her hand in front of my face. And the syringe full of sick pink liquid. It was full...full! She hadn't used it on me. She hadn't...
"Thank you," I choked out. I was fading fast. I shut my eyes. Everything was too heavy.
"Get some sleep, Sydney." her voice called from underwater. "Everything will seem better in the morning."
I had kept my promise. After I woke up Stanton and I made a big show of my "memory loss". They recorded it for their records, and I was sent on my merry little way. Only, not really. Stanton watched me like a hawk. I wasn't to have any contact with Jill or Eddie or anyone who'd been involved in the Palm Springs "incident" as they now liked to call it. Certainly not Adrian.
Just thinking his name hurts. It hurts so bad. Not knowing where he is, who he's with. What he's feeling. Did the drug really work on him? I've seen his tape. The one Stanton promised to show me. I almost threw up when I watched it. But maybe...a small, tiny, stupid little part of me wants to believe that maybe it's not true. Maybe he was just pretending, too. Most of me know that's not true. They took him from me. They took me from him. But he doesn't even know that. He doesn't even know me. Not anymore. It's been a year and some months now. A year and some months of doing every little thing Stanton asks of me. If I so much as bellyache about an assignment all she has to do is give me a look. A look that says, I still have it. I still have a pinky finger's length of nightmare that can strip away all that you hold dear. All that you have left. A year and some months. They say time heals all wounds don't they? Well, they're lying.
"And here I thought you were doing so well." I don't jump at the sound of Stanton's voice. I'm used to her impromptu visits. Popping into to 'check on me' every so often.
"I don't know what you mean," I say coolly as I fold a sweater crisply between my fingers and place it into my suitcase.
"I'm not an idiot, Sydney."
"No, that's certainly not the word I'd use for you." I agree.
She gives me a hard look. "I know what you're doing."
"Going on a well-deserved vacation?" I ask, zipping up my suitcase for punctuation. "Keen observation, Ms. Stanton."
"Going on a suicide mission," she says. I look up.
"Excuse me?"
"Don't play dumb with me, Sydney." she strides toward me with a vengeance. "We're way past these sort of games. Are we not?"
"I'm not playing a game," I say meeting her hard gaze. "Or maybe I am, can never be sure with you."
"I am not your enemy." Stanton says, sounding genuinely hurt. "I never have been, Sydney."
I choose to ignore this statement. Now is not the best time to rile her. "I don't know what you're getting so worked up about," I sigh. "I formally requested the month off and you cleared it yourself. I think I deserve a little R&R, don't you?"
"I know you've been making calls to Jillian Dragomir," she says, and I mentally wince. I guess I'm not as crafty as I thought. Still, I won't give away a damn thing.
I simply look at her in confusion. "If that were true, how would you even know that? Are you tapping my phone?"
She crosses her arms. "I have my ways."
It had been so long since everything happened, I had been waiting for Stanton to ease off me a bit, and it seemed like she had been. When she cleared me for a month's paid vacation I thought surely I had won back her trust. I guess not. Because I had been calling Jill. She couldn't tell me much. When it all happened, she'd been plucked out of Palm Springs and planted somewhere else, she didn't know where Adrian was. I could only assume that his time in Palm Springs had been erased. She told me she'd spoken to him, briefly, a few weeks after It happened. He didn't remember anything about Palm Springs. In his mind, Jill had gone there only with Eddie, and when Jill asked him what he had been up to in all that time, he breezily shrugged her off, changing the subject as if it confused him. Then she said they'd lost contact, he texted her occasionally, but she could never get him to really talk to her, which was strange. She said it was like he was almost a completely different person.
A couple weeks ago, however, after a particularly soul sucking day of work, I had a message from Jill on my phone. I had explicitly told her never to leave me messages. Fearing the worst, I clicked play. It was just her breathless, excited voice saying "Call me." So I did. She hadn't even said hello. Just said, "New York".
"New York?" I had asked. "What does that mean?"
"I felt something." she gushed. "Through the bond. I haven't felt anything like it in forever. And I saw New York. New York, Sydney!" she screeched when I didn't say anything. "That's where he is."
"Sydney?" Stanton's voice snaps me back into the present. "Hello, am I talking to a brick wall?"
"I don't know," I say, unable to stop myself. "Are you?"
"Sydney," her voice was serious now. "Don't be stupid. I thought...I thought you were over all this. It's been over a year now. You've been fine for so long. Why jeopardize everything now?"
"Over all this..." I repeat dazedly. The words taste sour in my mouth. I suppose she would think that. I've done a pretty good job of hiding my emotions. She doesn't see me when I'm at my worst. When it's all I can do to curl up in a ball and scream into my dark room. Alone. She doesn't know about the times I've got down on my knees and prayed for a sign that Adrian might still be out there somewhere. My Adrian. She doesn't know about the nights I've spent lying awake, fantasizing that when I finally fall asleep he will come to me, in my dream, and say how much he's missed me. He'll kiss my swollen eyes and tell me he loves me so much, that I'm a stupid girl to think he ever could have forgotten about me.
"I won't let you do this, Sydney." Stanton says. "You're too smart to do this."
She is right about one thing. I am too smart. Smart enough to know the best way to weasel yourself out of a caught lie is to tell a half truth.
"I know it's stupid, but I need to do it. For closure." I sigh heavily and look away, like I'm suddenly shy. "I was planning on going to New York anyway, for the museums, you know. And then when Jill called me and told me he might be there...I just thought..." I bite my lip, like I'm telling her my biggest secret. "I just thought that I could, you know, do a little digging. Find out where he's staying or working and see. Just see. I'm not going to talk to him. I mean, obviously. He doesn't know who I am." Even squished inside the soft cushioning of my deceit, it's hard to say out loud. He doesn't know who I am.
She presses her lips in a tight line. "You know I don't believe that for a second."
I smile sweetly. "Which part?"
"Sydney," she warns. "Don't."
"I'm telling you the truth," I lie. "If you don't believe me you can follow me to New York if you want. I honestly don't care what you do with your time. Now if you'll excuse me, I do have a plane to catch." I grab my suitcase by the handle and pull it toward the door of my apartment.
"I want you back here, end of the month, 6 AM sharp." she calls after me. "And so help me, Sydney Sage, if you're not. If I find out if you've done something..." I can hear the anger in her voice, but it's strange and displaced sounding. "You will regret it. I saved you from re-education once. I can't make that promise again. And re-education is nothing to joke about. Believe me when I say you'll wish you took that drug when you had the chance."
My hand still on the knob of my door, I turn to her. Awash with sudden curiosity. "Why did you save me?"
"I told you," she says, obviously taken aback by the question. "I wasn't going to let one stupid mistake ruin you for life. I wanted more for you, Sydney. And all re-education would do is-"
"No," I cut her off swiftly. "I'm not talking about re-education. I'm talking about the drug. I saw the look in your eyes. You were going to give it to me. Even with my blubbering, you had your heart set on wiping me clean. So why? What changed your mind?"
She looks at me and I look at her. She looks away. She looks back. "I made an executive decision that you would be of best use to me if your mind was not compromised."
I hold her gaze for a moment. It's an odd answer. But I see that it's all she's going to give me. I nod slowly, then open the door and turn to head out.
"And-" she says so suddenly I jump. I turn to face her.
"And?" I prompt.
She walks toward me slowly, stopping when she reaches the doorway. Her closeness unsettles me. "That Moroi didn't get the same preamble you did, I simply walked in, questioned him briefly, and then gave him the dose. He had no way of knowing what was in it, what it would do. But he..." she pauses, as if she's questioning whether she should go on. My heart is in my throat. Keep talking I want to scream. Shut up I want to scream even more. She's never brought up Adrian like this before. Not ever. I don't want to know. But I have to know.
"I think he realized what was happening to him," she says finally. Her voice goes strange and tight. If I didn't know her better I would think she was getting choked up. "As the drug began to kick and he said..." her pauses are like knives in my stomach, "right before he faded out he said, "Please, don't do this to her. Don't screw up her mind. Her mind is who she is. You can't take that away from her." And then when the time came, and you were lying there, begging me not to, your words echoing his..." she shrugs, cold and aloof again, like she's recalling a humdrum afternoon, "What do you know? I just couldn't do it."
She walks past me and out the door, pausing briefly to say, "Remember my warning, Sydney. End of the month. 6 AM. Don't be stupid."
My world tilts on its axis. I want to cry but I think I'm in shock. I don't know what any of it means. Why Stanton is humoring me. Why she chose to tell me that now. Why Jill felt Adrian when she did. But for the first time in such a very, very long, sad, dark time. I feel something other than crippling grief. I feel hope.
I'm going to find him. I'm going to bring him back to me. My Adrian is still out there. I just know it.