I'm pretty sure I wrote this right after rereading Destroy me considering how dramatic my diction is.
Warner is in the archive to follow up on his hypothesis about Alice's powers not being limited to distances. I guess Alice is with Delalieu or something trying to come to terms with the fact that she's an Unnatural.
And BTW Warner is probably OOC in this. But I still like to think that if he did have a surrogate little sister he would react like this.
He's so dramatic with Juliette after all.
My tense is also all over the place in this, but whatever :P
He pressed enter and the loading symbol appeared. The database was large and covered the entire globe, and his search so old that it was understandable that it had to work on it. But his fingers still tapped the table impatiently.
Still tried to speed it up by seeming intimidating. It did not pay him any mind.
Three seconds. Five seconds. Eight. Ten. Thirteen. Thirty. Forty. It spun and spun and spun. Archived files started appearing at the top of the page. And they grew by the thousands. Not everyone had the right name, or area even. Some weren't even news articles.
He scrolled down, tried to decide on a strategy on where to begin. Tried to filter out what was worthy of his time or not. It brought him right back to that first week when she appeared. The hours spent in there getting nowhere.
He shot those thoughts between the eyes.
He focused on one that fitted his keywords to a degree.
He opened it. Let his eyes scroll over the lines. The ö:s and ä:s were there, but it didn't tell him anything. No pictures. No words he could puzzle together to get a context.
Return.
He clicked on another one that just said Scandinavia, thinking it was a lucky guess. But this one lacked å and ö, and instead used Ø.
Return.
Found another one further down. Opened.
It was in Swedish. And he understood just as much as the first one.
He took a deep breath. Despite his extraordinary language skills he didn't have the time to try and decipher every article written in Swedish. If he was going to gain anything from this he needed a translator. And Google translate wasn't a thing anymore. He moved the cursor to click return.
Then something caught his eye.
PNG ATTACHED
There; in the info.
He clicked.
A new window opened and a picture started loading. Beginning at the top and appearing in small bars. First: the blue sky. The kind of sky they didn't have anymore.
Then it loaded.
He felt his stomach hit the floor as soon as he registered the pale blue eyes smiling at him through the camera.
It was her. A little younger for sure, but it was her. A little chubbier in that childhood kind of way.
Blonde locks framed her face and he saw that they continued down in two braids.
She was right. She did look bad in long hair.
In all of his gut wrenching glory he had to scoff. Then he had to grip the table because he was feeling nauseous. Quickly, before he lost control, he returned to the article and looked at the date.
It was from fifteen years ago.
'There might not be a limit to the duration she chooses...' (- A/N Castle said that in an unwritten chapter)
He felt his lungs fill up to the max. He hadn't even realized his heart rate had gotten faster. Was he afraid? Afraid of what? He took a moment to calm down. He ran a hand over his face. Exhaled.
He returned to the article. Saved it to the drive in a new folder. Then he followed the suggested links to the archived "Relevant material". And there he found articles in English.
He hesitated.
He didn't know if he wanted to close down the whole page and come back later with reinforcements or get comfortable.
He went with the latter.
The titles started loading.
Young girl missing from graduation in Sweden
Suspected kidnapping of Swedish girl
Search continues for young girl in Sweden
City in grief
He started reading.
Article after article. Memo after memo. And as the dates grew younger it was used as a reference.
I was supposed to write some excerpts here, but I can't be bothered to do it now.
It was right there. Everything he had ever asked. But his mind stayed as blank.
What was he going to do now?
A part of him wanted to run back to the gym and give her a bone crushing hug. Wanted to be there to dry the tears that would come. Wanted to be there and tell her he would be there forever.
Another wanted to burn the archive to the ground. To spread its ashes with the wind. To delete every trace of her past life. Because if she didn't know, she'd believe they were still alive. And that was better than telling her like this.
For there were obituaries.
One for the mother and the sister. Dated during the first pneumonic plague. Before they knew what they were up against.
One for the father. He had died of cancer.
Warner read their files, because they had been registered citizens. Alice hadn't; because she had legally been proclaimed dead ten years after going missing.
For the main reason that she had no family left who were looking for her.
Then Warner went and told Alice. Or something. And she was sad. But not that sad since she doesn't really remember what her parents were like.