AN: Have I recently be re-reading these books? Yes, yes I have. Did I dig back into the depths of my old writing to find this and rewrite it? Hmm maybe. Re-reading Out of Sight, Out of Time as an adult just really hits differently. Not to mention, I just have a lot of feels and emotions about Bex and Zach's dynamic after that summer.
So I had to find this old fic of mine and rewrite it
At that moment, she wasn't an operative in training; she wasn't the daughter of two MI6 agents. Rebecca Baxter was just a girl who was more confused than she'd care to admit. She didn't know exactly how she felt because all of her feelings were muddled together.
Was she worried? Mostly, yeah. Was she angry? Hell, yeah. Was she scared? Definitely. Upset? Pissed? You name it.
The only thing she knew for certain was that she was broken. It was as if a part of her was missing, ripped away with her missing best friend.
She had spent her entire summer vacation chasing down false leads with her parents and Zach.
Bex had spent the last three months in a living hell, constantly wondering where Cammie was. It was a bad habit of hers to creep on every CIA bulletin checking to see if her best mate was dead.
Each time there was nothing a weight lifted off her shoulders, but only a little until she remembered who they were dealing with. Bex knew that if Circle wanted, they could have killed Cammie and no one would know.
She looked around the room she shared with her two roommates, her two closest friends and the barrage of feelings got worse.
It should be three. Not two.
She should have three roommates. Not just two.
Suddenly, staring at Cammie's empty bed became too much and she couldn't take it anymore. She jumped up from her bed, muttered something to Macey and Liz who shot her questionable looks about needing air and slipped out of the room.
She slowly worked on getting her breathing back to normal before she passed out; or worse, had a panic attack.
Get it together, Bex, she scolded herself. Baxter's don't act like this.
She didn't even care where she was going; she just let her feet lead her where they wanted. Bex relished in the quiet halls, it was late enough that most of the girls had retired to their rooms, a few stragglers were here and there in the common rooms she passed; but she was mostly alone.
She was glad to not have the looks from everyone, glad to not hear the whispers or the rumors about Cam. It was just her and the silence, which gave her plenty of room to think.
Why didn't she take me or Zach with her? Why didn't she take anyone? Why couldn't she have taken some bloody backup?
But apparently that was too much to ask for; because Morgan's and Cameron's were stubborn. Too stubborn sometimes, and Cammie was both.
Bex didn't know where she had ended up, until she almost walked into a wall. She surveyed her surroundings, realizing that she was in that narrow corridor near the Hall of History. She reached for the light switch on the wall and pulled it. A bookcase slid aside to reveal the secret passway she was definitely familiar with and she slipped inside.
Bex followed the dark, narrow corridor until she came to a door, she could hear humming and beeping coming through the wood.
Her breath left her as she took in the sight.
The man who lay in the hospital bed, hooked up to machines was her former Covert Operations teacher. Even though the bruises had faded and the bandages were off, she could still vividly remember how he looked when they first brought him here.
The boy, who sat in the chair next to the bed, wasn't the guy who would give his life for her best mate, nor was he the cocky spy with the cool indifference. He was just a boy who looked just as sad and pitiful as she felt.
At that moment, they were alike.
Bex wanted to say something, but didn't know exactly what she should say. They spent a summer together, chasing down empty lead after empty lead. They'd said and done everything, there wasn't much left.
IInstead, she stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame.
A moment later, the silence was broken, but not by her.
"He's stable," Zach said, and she could hear the strain in his voice. Bex knew he wanted more than anything for Joseph Solomn - the man he saw as a father - to wake up.
She also knew that he was looking for something else - anything else to talk about besides the matter that was pressing on both of their minds.
Bex couldn't help but glance into his eyes. They looked sad, but not the kind of sad that came and went, but the kind that a person carried with them throughout their everyday life, wearing them down. The kind that boyish smiles and witty responses no longer seemed to hide.
He stared back, searching her eyes for any speck of hope. But she couldn't give him what he was looking for; she wasn't the one he wanted. She wasn't the Chameleon with the dishwater blonde hair that had run away from him.
From her. From Gallagher. From everyone.
"Do you think we'll ever find her?" she heard someone ask and was shocked to learn that it was her. It felt odd, hearing her own voice. She had only spoken when she absolutely had to recently.
It was a question they'd all been asking for the months (three months, 16 days, 10 hours, 18 minutes) that she had been gone. It was a question that had gone unanswered for so long; because they were all too afraid of the answer.
"That's not the question you should ask yourself," Zach said.
He didn't have to say anything else, he didn't have to elaborate. She knew, eventually, that they would find Cammie. But the real question, the unasked question that everyone was too afraid to ask.
Would they be too late?
Bex hadn't been thinking about it much, and didn't allow herself to dwell. It was too much to handle, even for her. Though she didn't have many other options and it was hard for her to not think like that.
It'd been too long.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
"Bex," Zach said, almost in a whisper. She wasn't sure he even had spoken until she opened her eyes and her gaze fell on him. His voice sounded weak, defeated - exactly how she felt. Bex hated it and she hated her for making them feel this way. "Why didn't she take me with her?"
Bex didn't respond because she didn't have an answer for him. She couldn't answer him because she didn't even know her best mate anymore and Bex sure as hell didn't understand her anymore. Bex just didn't know and it was killing her.
"Why didn't she bloody take me?"
"It's my fault….I'm the one that put the idea to run in her head….I asked her to run away with me."
Bex shook her head. "We can't blame ourselves, Zach."
"Little too late for that."
She suddenly felt claustrophobic in the makeshift hospital room; that is something Rebecca Baxter had never had happen to her. Of all the small places she'd been forced into on the countless missions she'd gone on with her parents, the CoveOps classes, their little extracurriculars, she had never one felt like this.
Bex felt cornered, defeated, lost, and downright scared. Terrified even. They were all foregin emotions to her and it was Cam's fault. Her leaving caused Bex to feel like this.
"She'll find us," Bex said, determined. "She'll come home."
Bex knew that she said it more to convince herself than Zach; because she knew that she needed to hear it more than anything. If only she could believe herself.
Zach gave a sad smile, as if he too, didn't really believe it. "She'll come home when she wants to. If she wanted to be found, she would have been found already."
Bex knew he was mostly right. Cammie would return when she wanted to; but only if she was able to return. That part didn't reassure Bex in any way, because they were dealing with the Circle of Cavan. If the circle wanted to find someone, Bex knew that they would and it wouldn't be pretty in the end.
She'd seen the after effects of the Circle. She was staring right at it at a man in a hospital bed.
"Where did you go?" Bex found herself asking. She doesn't know why she asked, or even if it really made a difference; but the question was out there. Though she'd be lying if she wasn't curious about his few weeks disappearance from her parents this summer.
"A part of me wondered if I would have better luck trying to find Cammie on my own. I'd been pretty good at it before," Zach explained, glancing back at Joe. "I even hacked into the CIA and MI6's databases' for any speck of information, but I found nothing. Not a damn thing. When that didn't work out, I went looking for her."
Of course he went looking for Catherine.
"I looked everywhere I thought they might be. I thought that if I could find my mother, I could find Cammie. It turns out I was wrong, I couldn't find either of them," Zach went on. "There's this saying Joe once told me, 'everything has a way of working out in the end.' I don't really believe in it; not fully. But this past summer, this past year even, it gave me something to hold onto. It didn't really stop me from going crazy though."
Silence filled the space between them, but the silence isn't what kept them apart. It was the memory of her, Cameron Morgan - the girl who couldn't stop running away. The one who left everyone behind to go chasing after the people who wanted her.
Bex soon realized that they'd both been hurt repeatedly in their lives, especially in the past few months. She was reminded that sometimes what hurts the most is the betrayal of those closest to you.
It's the people you hold the closest who have the power to make you bleed.
At that moment, neither of them were spies. They were just a boy and a girl who were broken. They were two people, who were hurt and emotionally scared, because of one girl.
Bex knew how he felt and he knew how she felt. They were united in this, not by choice but by a force of will. They were nothing to the other, but they were all each other had.