I Knew I'd Find You Somewhere
A The Missing & Mirror, Mirror crossover fanfiction
~2010~
Daniella McCarthy glanced over at her sister and Angela in the aisle across from her own seat on the plane.
Angela looked tense – not because she was motion sick or anything, her drawn-in expression probably having more to do with the fact, even though she was going along with it, she didn't believe for a minute Daniella – whatever she'd said – had permission from her family to fly out all the way to New Zealand. Daniella felt a bit guilty about that, about how worried her parents would be, but how could she have explained this to them? Nobody except Maria – and, to a lesser extent, Leo, currently seated on Maria's other side, by the window – would have understood. Leo actually did look like he needed an air-sickness bag. Maria'd reached over and was squeezing his balled-up fist in her own strong hand so tightly the skin spread over his knuckles looked stretched and taut.
In her hands, Daniella held only a single object – an illustrated children's book.
Back in 1918, when the rest of their family had been assassinated, Gary and Hodge – as part of their devious scheme to sell famous, imperiled children of history to rich clients in the future – had kidnapped Daniella, then seventeen-year-old Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov, from the Ipatiev House, de-aged her into a baby, and – through a series of unforeseen events (and one lost airplane, not unlike this one) – she'd ended up adopted by loving parents in the 21st century.
Until recently, she hadn't known – hadn't remembered – anything about her past life as a grand duchess. But after relieving her past, and having Hodge and Gary interfere all over again (this time snagging Maria and the kitchen boy Leonid as well as herself), there were certain things left unresolved.
The major one being what happened to her baby brother Alexis.
Gary and Hodge had wanted him, too, even the first time around, seeing as his hemophilia was curable in the future, but they hadn't got him.
He'd been missing from the house hours before the execution.
Before Gary and Hodge swooped in and took Anastasia.
Someone dressed like one of their guards had woken him up and walked him out of her parents' room – Anastasia thought only to go downstairs for something – and then she'd never seen him again.
Glad as she was he hadn't been in that basement when the bullets flew, neither the first nor second time around, the mystery had begun to consume her – the part of herself she had to hide from her adoptive parents ever since returning to her 21st century home – to the point she was having nightmares.
Had he survived? Or had the phony guard murdered him, meaning his bones rested somewhere in the same forest as their parents and other two sisters?
The bones found in 2007 hadn't really been hers, they'd been faked, but what if his – poor Alexei's – had been genuine and that JB person hadn't told her and Maria to spare their feelings?
Daniella found out, through research in the Harris Middle School Computer Lab, a lot about the various Alexei claimants who'd cropped up in the twenties and thirties, none of them as famous as her own impostor – Anna Anderson – but somehow not a single one felt like they might really be her brother.
Then, in the oddest place, she'd found him – she was sure of it.
A children's book in the school library, written by an Australian author named Andrew Tiegan. The text was ordinary picture-book stuff, but when she looked at the pictures themselves, Daniella recognized a style she would have known anywhere.
Alexei had drawn some of them.
Not all.
Maria had, as gently as possible, pointed out many of the illustrations didn't look like their brother's artwork at all. "He never drew in such jagged straight lines or colored unevenly. These here" – she'd turned a page and run her little finger over a picture – "are wonderful, beautiful, but they don't look like something Alexei would do."
But some.
"He had help, that's all!" Daniella had pulled the book back and flipped it closed. "Look, the author didn't do the illustrations himself – they're credited to J.T. & N.T. – Alexei could be either one of them!"
"But this book was published in 2001 – if our brother survived that night, he would have been ninety-four." She hadn't been able to speak through the lump which formed in her throat to add now, in 2010, he would be either a hundred-and-six, the oldest known hemophiliac, as well as one of the oldest men in the world period...
But Anastasia wasn't so sure. If anyone could cheat the blood disease and live on when no one expected him to, it was her brother. Her brother who by all logic should have died in a hunting lodge in Poland, Rasputin or no Rasputin. But he'd lived. And he might still. Or, better yet, what if his kidnapper had been a time traveler, too? What if he'd been de-aged and was still young, like her? What if, in 21st century life, with better treatment for his condition, he got to practice his work more and was a child art prodigy! If he was thirteen like her, he would have been only eight when he drew those pictures. Maybe that's why only his initials were on the book, why he was credited only as N.T or J.T.!
So, she'd tracked down Andrew Tiegan. Chip and Alex, two other missing famous children, had helped her. Apparently, Andrew had been living in Wellington, New Zealand for several years already when the book with her brother's drawings in it was released. His wife was the principal of a school, the reason they'd left Australia to begin with. They had three children, all grown up now. Interestingly, two of these were adopted, but Chip hadn't been able to find out which of the two. The youngest boy was at university in Auckland – the other two apparently still lived in Wellington.
Daniella got it into her head one of them had to know where she could find Alexei. Somehow, she was growing more and more certain he was in Wellington, waiting for her there.
Maybe it was insane to beg Angela to take her, Maria, and Leonid to the other side of the world looking for a brother she was only certain was there because of a picture book, and dangerous (as well as stupid) to lie to her parents about it, but to miss her only chance to find him was unthinkable.
If her hope he'd been taken through time was incorrect, and he really was over a hundred years old, she couldn't wait until she was an adult to go to him.
After all, Jonah Skidmore hadn't seen her brother's tracer. She'd asked him, and he'd said no. Meaning it wasn't impossible his disappearance had nothing to do with time travel – that he had always been missing from the basement.
The plane lurched, hitting a pocket of turbulence, and Daniella pressed the book's worn, faded-red spine to the tip of her nose, breathing in deep.
"I'm coming, Alexei," she whispered. "And I'm bringing Maria with me. We're on our way. We'll be together soon. Just hang on. Wait for me."
Please, please wait for me.
"You're going to be laaaattteee," Jo Tiegan warned as her husband leaned over her chair and draped his arms around her; her tone was teasing and sing-songy.
He nuzzled her neck. "I will ring them and say I'm unwell."
"Hmmm. With what this time?" Jo laughed, leaning back, enjoying the feel of his lips on her throat. "You've used every excuse already this year."
He pulled a hair's breadth away and – blinking up at her – murmured, "Bird flu?"
"You used it."
"Measles."
"Yeah, that one, too – twice, I think."
"Fine – hysterical pregnancy, then. I am almost certain I haven't used that one."
"Actually, Nick, you have." Jo wrinkled her nose. And for some bizarre reason she never entirely understood, no one – neither on the Board or the staff – questioned it.
Oddly enough, the one excuse he never used, when he wanted time off to fool around with his wife, was the one that was occasionally a real reason for him to miss work – his haemophilia. Even with treatment, he had his bad days, but they never cried wolf where his real medical complaint was concerned.
He groaned.
She turned her head and gave him a quick peck on the tip of his nose. "Relax; I'll still be here when you get back." With a gesture at the sheets of paper, drawing pencils, Textas, sharpeners and pencil shavings spread across the breakfast table, she added, "I've got to finish these by tonight anyway. Sandra" – her agent – "will be spewing if I don't meet the deadline this time. Besides, you know if you try to leave the kids to a relief teacher for a whole day, they'll just march over here and get you themselves."
"Ah, yes, of course; there is no help for it – the perils of living next-door to one's place of employment," he sighed. "One day I'm going to do something mad – absolutely mad – just to see if I am capable of shocking them into leaving me be."
"Like what?"
He shrugged. "I don't know – perhaps I will dye part of my hair purple."
"Far out." She could kind of see that working for him. The Board would for sure freak, though. "But in the meantime, I left you some coffee in the pot." Jo gestured with her chin. "It's still hot."
"Merci, mon chère!" Another kiss, this time on her forehead.
Watching him over her shoulder as he poured himself a cup, Jo found herself wondering exactly when they had basically become her parents. Back in 1995, when she'd first met Nicholas, this same kitchen table had been her father's impromptu office after they moved here from Australia. And her mother was principal of the school next door, the school she and Nick attended as teenagers – and the one Nick was now headmaster of. Jo wasn't a writer like Andrew – she'd never felt she had much of a way with words – but she'd always loved to draw; her childhood bedroom was covered in her sketches ever since she'd learned finger-painting in kindergarten. Nicholas had been a natural artist, too, and nine years ago they'd both helped her dad illustrate one of his books: a preschool-age fairy-tale which had been a major deviation from his usual chapter books for older kids involving musical plumbing and magical aliens. But it had been Jo who stuck with the craft after the book came out, who decided to make it her career, while Nicholas ended up going into teaching instead.
Now she drew pictures – for kid's books, mainly sci-fi or horses – and he had his nine to five right next door.
Funny, in a way, how neatly it all worked out, as if it were fated. Her parents went back to Australia (although, being just across the Tasman, they visited often enough their absence wasn't too painfully felt) and her brother, Royce, was in university in Auckland, making him a good-natured, part-time rival with Nicholas, who'd taken his own higher education right here in Wellington and swore by his stubborn belief it was the superior place of learning.
Theirs was almost a picture-book life in and of itself sometimes – the pretty couple in the pretty house, each with their own pretty career – and Jo knew they were lucky. Regardless of the very real troubles they faced – school problems, haemophilia attacks – to any outsider who saw only the good, their lives resembled those stock-photographs in picture frames on store shelves; they even had a dog, a little gold-coloured Cocker Spaniel Nicholas had named Bullet.
His Victoria University mug in one hand, now filled with black coffee, Nicholas returned to his former position behind her chair.
"Nick, if you spill that–" she warned.
"A tsarevich does not spill," he said, almost gasping on the last word, scandalised, as if she had implied he might accidentally run about naked as opposed to unintentionally tip a mug a smidgen too far forward.
Well, to be fair, he hadn't ever – not yet – not that she'd seen. If anything, Jo herself was more likely to. She wasn't naturally clumsy, not particularly – in fact, she had quick reflexes that made her really good at most sports – but she didn't have her husband's old-fashioned gracefulness, either, the kind that can't quite be taught in a modern setting, the royal manners-and-bearing kind.
"Sorry." She inclined her head back to kiss him, their lips inches apart when they heard the doorbell.
"Merde!" Nicholas exclaimed, pulling away. "They've found me."
"Better go see what they need," Jo said, assuming – as he did – it must be somebody from the school.
"I will see you tonight."
"Yes."
His whistle – some old Russian folk tune – faded into the next room, on his way to the front door, and Jo sighed and picked up her pencil, when – suddenly – the tune died mid-note.
Nicholas had opened the front door to reveal his sister Anastasia – exactly, minus her modern clothing, as she had looked in 1914.
In her hands, she was clutching one of his father-in-law's books.
And on the porch behind her, beside a woman he'd never seen before in his life, another of his sisters – Maria! – and Leonid (his only playmate at Ipatiev House, after they'd stopped permitting the doctor's son to visit).
The Victoria University mug slipped from his hand. His fingers had gone so numb he hadn't even felt himself drop it, wasn't aware of the loss – and then only dully, as if from a long way off – until it hit the floor and broke in an exploding splatter of red-yellow-and-blue porcelain and amber-hued coffee.
Blue eyes set to bulging, Nicholas stood there, the hand that had not held the coffee mug still on the door and his mouth parted, for only a moment, before murmuring, "Bozhe moi," and promptly dropping off into a dead faint.
So much for a tsarevich does not spill...
Alexei's story was even stranger than her own.
Elucidators, while futuristic, still had a root in science, in reality, just one not yet fully understood, whereas Daniella's brother had seemingly lived through a fairy-tale in its purest, least explicable form, having been brought into the end of the twentieth century via a magic mirror.
She was – in her own way – nearly as shocked as he, however, when the door had first opened.
Daniella had been expecting either an old man or a boy; she hadn't once considered the possibility of something in between.
When Alexei regained consciousness and could say something more coherent than "Uhhh..." (this took a bit longer than the former), and after his wife (Wife! Alexei was married! Daniella could hardly believe it!) came running to see what the matter was, and they'd all come inside and sat down in what Jo – this was his wife's name – called a lounge room, he told them his story.
Maria – who was taking this a lot better than Daniella or even Leonid, who'd gone very, very pale when he saw an adult version of the tsar's son answer the door and now positioned himself near a wall he could lean against it with his eyes half closed – sat on the carpet in front of the television with her feet tucked underneath her denim skirt and her eyes were wide, even though they were calm.
Angela sat on the sofa, a Cocker Spaniel who'd come looping down the stairs, silky ears flopping and dragging, sprawled across her knees.
Alexei had been told, the night he disappeared, he must disguise himself as a peasant, that he was being taken on a long journey. Although he'd tried to ask about the rest of his family, and the servants as well, he'd been shushed and pacified and told – quite patronizingly, he later realized – they would very soon follow.
He was not even permitted to bring his dog, Joy; only himself.
"I tried to make them let me keep my own coat," he said, at this point in the tale, shaking his head, "but I couldn't tell the man who – well, I suppose he wasn't really a guard – or a Bolshevik, for that matter – but all the same I could not tell him Mama had sewn jewels in the lining."
Daniella remembered – in a sudden rush – seeing his coat as they left their quarters upstairs, neatly folded over a chair and quite abandoned, and thinking how cold he would be without it.
"There was gunfire – the animal cart they'd put me on lost a wheel... Someone came after me."
"Was it Yurovsky?" Maria asked.
Angela, mentally brushing up on a bit of Russian history, wondered if that would have been possible, Yurovsky no doubt preoccupied with the bodies of the murdered family, knowing he only had a few hours to hide them and clean up the basement...
But she didn't say so.
"I don't know," was Alexei's answer. "There was a great deal of moonlight, but it was still difficult to make out faces... It all happened so quickly. There were great dogs, and I was afraid... I was forced to run for my life."
"Your leg!" Daniella couldn't help it. "You'd been in bed for days!"
"I found the strength, somehow – how exactly I still do not truly understand – and I made it as fair as the road and there was a man on a great horse."
The man had been a stranger, but obviously not a Russian (so not a Bolshevik, either) and therefore preferable to the mob at his back, so he'd let the foreigner rescue him and gallop off.
Sir Ivor, he was called; he told Alexei he was employed by the British government and would take him to safety.
Only something went very, very wrong.
Rather than take him to England, he travelled all over the world, changing his name, calling him his ward. Always there was some excuse, and they were good ones (if not ones which could bear much close analysis, when it came to that) and Alexei felt wicked for doubting his savior's word, nonetheless, his stories seemed to ring less and less true.
"I was sixteen by then. And Sir Ivor began to call me Nicholas – like Papa. At times, I nearly forgot it wasn't my real name. I still do. You're the first person in a very long time to call me Alexis." Daniella watched as her brother twisted their father's signet ring around his finger. "Ivor took me here to New Zealand, where he refused to let me associate with the neighbors, though they had children only a little younger than myself." He smiled, his gaze shifting to his wife. "And one of them had a mysterious friend whose speech I could understand perhaps half of at best."
This 'mysterious friend' had travelled from the year 1995 through a mirror in their neighbor's house.
"This house," Alexei explained. "Nearly a hundred years ago – or fifteen, if you like."
Maria's big blue eyes sparkled. "Through the mirror? Like Alice in Wonderland!"
At first, Alexei couldn't follow his new friend through her magic mirror, though she promised to take him to her doctor in the future, to see if he could get treatment for his hemophilia. But later, after a harrowing adventure, when he'd needed to escape Sir Ivor – who'd cornered him in the room at the last minute – he tried the mirror again and found himself in 1995.
"I soon learned all was well in my own time – Sir Ivor was taken by the police and a dangerous drum of chemicals which was set to cause a great deal of trouble was neutralized – only..." He glanced at his hand. "I'd lost Papa's ring – a foolish act of trust where I ought to have been more prudent. Jo gave it to me in this time, but I couldn't return to 1919 with it. The mirror didn't allow two things to be in the same time."
So he'd remained in New Zealand, grown up, married Jo, and here he was.
"I never imagined there was the slightest hope any of you survived." His voice trembled and suddenly it became obvious – without anybody saying so – there was a gap between Daniella and Alexei now, even in something as simple as that – as their voices. He had a faint Russian accent he might never entirely lose; she sounded like somebody from Michigan who'd recently moved to Ohio. Because, grand duchess though she'd once been, she was that, as well. "I would have found you. I knew nothing about this lost plane or your elucidators, did you call them?"
"I know, Alyosha – I – we – thought you were dead, too." There was a lump in Daniella's throat as she held up the book. "But when I saw the pictures – then I knew, I knew you were alive. I knew it was really possible that..." Tears ran down her cheeks as he pulled her into a hug. "I knew–" she choked out against his shoulder, sniffing. "I knew–"
I knew I'd find you somewhere.
