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AvalonReeseFanFics

A/N: Happy Friday my wonderful readers! I'm glad to hear that you guys are excited for what's going to come next. It's not much longer now, don't you worry. And in case you guys are worried, I've got at least 30 chapters in my reserve now, so I won't be running dry any time soon. Also, I've hit the point of the story where the wedding is going to be taking place, which means I'll be able to tell you guys the exact chapter that Steve and Rowan will get married. Leave a review to tell if that's a chapter number you'd like to be updated on and I'll see you guys on Monday!

Chapter 294

Steve woke up one morning, only a couple days after interrogating everyone he could to try and get a better location on Rowan, to Grace's number flashing on his phone. Immediately he thought that Danny was dead, or sick, or dying.

"Hey! Hey! Grace, what's wrong?"

"Nothing, nothing. Everything's fine. It's up, it's there, the video," she said and then Steve was up and out of bed and rushing around for a completely different reason.

He padded his way downstairs as quickly as he could, he went to his laptop and hurriedly turned it on. "When did it go up?"

"Last night, I've been checking every day, once in the morning and once at night before bed. Sometimes I'll check at lunch if I'm bored… and it's finally there," she said. "I've already watched it. It's actually kind of cute."

Yeah, Steve didn't want to know that Rowan and Wo Fat looked cute together. Not when one of her cover stories was that the two of them were fucking dating. He knew it was a cover, but he still worried that maybe part of the reason Rowan didn't want to come back because she had gotten together with Wo Fat. That would literally kill him if she left him Wo Fat… romantically.

He got the laptop on and logged into Rowan's drop box. The last couple days he had gone through all of the videos that were there. He had watched Wo Fat rescue Rowan, he saw how bad it was the first day Wo Fat got her back. He went through all the pictures in all the files to see what she had been doing. She went from a red head to a brunette between Colombia and Toronto. There were a lot pictures of her on horses at what he would assume were taken at different ranches. She must have driven across Canada and stopped at every ranch she could find.

In fact, the only thing he got from those pictures was that Wo Fat definitely catered to every one of her whims. It was like he never said no to her.

He also got to see her evolution. Rowan's transformation into an ice queen dressed exactly like Wo Fat happened somewhere between leaving Canada and showing up in England. But there was so much space between Canada and England, even in the sense of the pictures. There was just this big gap of missing time between those two places and that was scary.

He scrolled down to the Disney cruise folder that was simply named #4 and along with the video he found pictures. He could look at those later. He immediately clicked on the video and it start playing.

It started with Wo Fat in a white suit with blue and gold accents and a poufy ascot tucked into his jacket and as the music started to play, which was coming from a live band, Rowan came walked into the room. The camera widened out as the two walked to the middle of the dance floor. Was he surprised that she wasn't wearing Belle's dress, but Ariel's pink one? No. She loved Ariel.

Then she smiled when she saw Wo Fat, that pretty smile, her happy one. Her dark brown hair up in an elaborate twist, surprising because it was so short. But the song they were dancing to was what got to him, because it was a song he recognized: Perfect. A song he knew she wrote because she had written it while she was in this house, he had listened to her strum the chords over and over.

Steve watched breathlessly as they waltzed. Jealous anger burning in the way they twirled, bodies pressed to one another in a waltz they clearly had memorized. He watched with nothing short of longing as they sung the words to each other, wishing with all his might that it was him who was in that video with her. The grand finale had them spinning, in an elaborate hold, but once the music stopped the video stopped too.

"Did you see it? What do you think? It looks like he got a professional video crew for this. I don't know which one, or why she did Beauty and the Beast dressed as Ariel and Eric but whatever," Grace said and Steve sat back.

"Yeah, thanks Gracie, is uh… is your dad home?"

"Nope, I told him about the video, he's on his way to your place."

Steve smiled. Grace was just on top of everything. He thanked her, and then went to unlock his door so that Danny could let himself in. Then he practically sprinted up the stairs to get changed.

This was it! He finally had all of the pieces. Everything he needed to find Rowan was in that file. All he needed was to figure out which boat she was on and he'd have Rowan back.

H5O-H5O-H5O-H5O

Danny hadn't just gone to Steve's. First, he had picked up malasadas and coffee, then he had called the others. He got to Steve's house, to find him going through the pictures of everything that had been happening on that cruise. And there were one too many videos of Rowan and Wo Fat dancing.

But from those pictures they established that Rowan and Wo Fat were alone on that ship.

Once everyone was there, they split up and started calling different people. Steve called Joe first, told him what was going on and asked for help. Joe told him he'd get in contact with a few friends of his and see if he could get a private line to the Cruise captain.

Danny got on the phone with TSA and asked for access to all the different ports that the Disney Cruise left from, in the last week to see if they had any anomalies in the batch. Which Chin and Grover went to the palace to get their computer to go through. Kono got on the phone with Disney's head office and had them looking for any Rory Wickerby, or Rowan Pierce or Anthony Shu and a million other names Wo Fat might possibly be flying under to see if they could come up with the reservation the two were booked under.

But after three hours of being on the phone. They had nothing. Literally nothing.

For starters Disney didn't have a single reservation with the name Rory, Rowan, Wo Fat, Anthony or any other names that Wo Fat used as aliases in the past. That meant that he had done what STeve had been worried about. Wo Fat knew that Steve knew about the Rory Wickerby identity and he had created her a new one, one that Steve didn't know about. For fuck sake, do you know how hard it was going to be to pin her down now?

Steve originally had hope to get a break with the TSA screening. But Chin and Grover too, came up with nothing. No one screened through with Rowan's face, nor with either of Rowan's names or Wo Fat's aliases. They even looked for that glitch in the scanning that had first alerted them to Rowan's strange way of getting through TSA. Apparently, however, they were having glitches like that all over at all of their counters. And t his had been going on all week. They suspected a virus but so far had not been able to fix the problem.

Steve knew right away that Wo had upped his game. Steve was going to kill Kong for helping him.

Joe had gotten them the number to all the captains for each of the four cruise ships. Steve had left a message at each asking about a certain guest doing certain activities and hadn't heard back yet. Which made sense because he didn't know what days she was doing things. He didn't even know what day she had boarded the boat, he only knew when the pictures appeared in the drop box.

Needless to say, Steve was frustrated. This was supposed to be his lucky break but it looked like Wo Fat had outsmarted him again.

They all sat there in the quiet of his living room, no doubt soaking in the disappointment he was trying to hide. This was the closest he had ever come to finding her again, not counting the concert where, if he had just been quicker, he could have had her back that night, and he couldn't help but feel like one, massive failure.

He could tell his friends were giving each other looks, talking to each other with their eyes. Clearly none of them knew what to say to him, but they all wanted someone to say something. After a moment when Danny clapped and Steve realized that Danny must have lost the argument his friends seemed to be having with their eyes.

"Look, we tried, you know. I'm sure… we'll hear from someone soon, right?"

Not in time for him to mobilize. He could send a million people to arrest her, they put her in a room and that was it, she'd just open up a portal and vanish.

"She gets off that boat and I won't find her again. You know that."

All his friends went quiet as they took that in, all knowing that it was true.

But Danny wasn't going to let him be down. "There's still one more folder, maybe that will be… you know, somewhere stationary?"

Yes, but when would they start putting pictures in that folder? What if it was being saved for something else? Wo Fat was naming them anything, simply numbering them off as if that was all he needed. Really how could he keep track so well?

Grace knocked on the door twice before letting herself in, a habit she had picked up from her father. A habit that Steve never quite faulted her for the way he did with Danny. She hugged her father first and then stooped down to hug Steve.

"You find her yet?" she asked sipping on her frozen coffee drink. Steve had been under the impression that she was going out with her girlfriends today. It was very nice of her to come and check up on them, very touching to see that she was also invested in finding her Auntie Ro.

Steve shook his head while his friends around him listed off the things that they had been doing for the last couple of hours. Grace took it all in and then seemed utterly surprised that the gang had turned up nothing.

They were used to taking nothing and sussing out clues, why the hell were Rowan and Wo Fat so good at evading them? Were they becoming too predictable? And if Wo Fat could be this good at evading him why was he only using that ability now when he had Rowan and not any of the previous times when it was just him.

"Well, why don't you call guest services and ask," Grace asked them but Steve shook his head.

"I don't even know when these were taken. There are hundreds upon hundreds of people on just one boat. Imagine how many people there are across four boats? Add in we don't know what name she's under we'll never sort through them all in time to find the one we're looking for. For all I know she's already off the boat. It's a needle in a haystack."

Grace nodded but narrowed her eyes a bit. "Wait a second, but… you guys know that this isn't one of the regularly offered experiences, right?" All eyes turned to her and that's when she realized they had no idea. "Yeah, you don't just get to waltz through their ballroom dressed up as a princess on your own. And if they did offer it, there would be more people. But yeah, I checked the experiences they offer and it's not a think. So that means they must have paid extra for this so that would mean that…"

"I just have to find the ballroom that got booked for a single dance at that date stamp yesterday," Steve cried. "Oh my god!"

Danny got up and hugged his daughter while Kono lunged for her phone so she could get back on with Disney headquarters. That time it didn't take long to get an answer.

The ballroom had been rented out by someone named Anthony Bastian, which was the same fake last name as Rowan's Bodyguard and the same name as one of Wo Fat's favourite aliases. Anthony Bastian and his plus one had boarded the Disney Dream five days ago and he had booked every single one of those excursions they had pictures of, which includes a princess and prince make over before the ballroom dance.

There was one catch. Despite him giving the information, despite them issuing the tickets, there was no information about whoever the plus one traveling with him was and there were three separate accounts of where they were getting off and when. Which Steven figured was Kong's doing. The Disney Rep they had on the line did say that all the information was logged with the ship, they just needed someone to access it.

They had given them the number directly to the bridge so they could talk to the Captain, with the promise of leaving yet another message from corporate so he knew how important it was for him to get back to Steve.

He was almost there. All he needed to do was get the man to talk to him. Confirm who he had on the ship and then Steve would be heading to their jumping off point to get his Rowan back.

H5O-H5O-H5O-H5O

Steve got off the phone with a heading.

The captain of the Disney Dream had called him an hour after they determined which ship the video was taken on. Captain John Spatas knew exactly who Steve was talking about and very pleasantly told him that the girl's name was Rosie Bastian, that Anthony Bastian was her brother. He also knew that they would be disembarking in the morning at the Castaway Cay heading to Bahamas.

Steve, for some reason, really didn't like the way that Captain John talked about Rowan, or Rosie as if he knew her. There was something slimy about the way he listed out every little bit of information that Steve asked for, as if he were happy to give the two of them up.

Steve pushed that niggling worry away and took the firsts step in his plan. He called TSA on Bahamas, told them the situation and at first, they wouldn't listen to him. They agreed to arrest her if she were with Wo Fat but if she were on her own, they saw no legal reason for detaining her.

Steve had to call Joe, and with his prodding he had gotten them to agree to hold Rowan once she disembarked until further instruction from him. Then Joe was kind enough to secure him military transport to Bahamas, which made the trip 10 hours long. Either way, Rowan was going to get off that boat before he got there. He just had to hope that Rowan didn't get away from them before Steve got there to take custody of her.

While he was doing that Danny called all their friends and told them the news. Though the others had left once they hit the waiting part of the search, Danny and Grace had stayed for dinner, which was very nice of them. It was heartwarming to him, to have Danny calling the calvary while he settled transportation to Bahamas.

And it made him feel a lot better when each every single one of his friends all volunteered to go down to the Bahamas with him to get Rowan back. He didn't even have to ask. Danny told them where she was, and they all said the same thing.

When do we leave?

There wasn't that much that Steve needed to do, and leaving as soon as possible was of the utmost importance. So, they were all given an hour and a half to get ready. Steve was ready in less than forty minutes. He wanted to call Nahele but the last time he had gone searching for Rowan it hadn't ended well and he didn't want to get his hopes up. Especially since, even if he did get Rowan back, there was no guarantee that Child Services would give Nahele back to them.

As he waited there with his gear and his duffle bag for his friends to join him, Steve went over his plan. Grace had handed him cue cards of every romantic line she could think of, and then gave him a stack of blank ones. He had been struggling with what exactly he should write but she was right about this, he'd need to hit Rowan with some kind of speech after what he was going to do. Luckily there was 10 hours between them and Hawaii and Grace had already said that Danny would help him think of a perfectly romantic speech to hit her with. And then another 10 hours back to Hawaii where he would be able to bust that speech out, because he was definitely going to have to prove that Wo Fat had lied to them both.

But that was secondary.

First, he had to make sure that when TSA picked Rowan up, they knew not to let her out of their sight, and to keep her hands in front of her at all times. Then of course, once TSA confirmed that they had Rowan in custody, he was to tell Joe and Joe would tell the AUTEC base to send Naval support to pick her up. Then Steve and the team would rendezvous with her there, and take her home. The plan was, once he had her, to hold onto her the whole time so she couldn't void herself away. Granted he wasn't 100% certain that it would work, but he had turned off her powers before, he was hoping he could do it again on command.

If everything went to plan the two of them wouldn't know what hit them.

H5O-H5O-H5O-H5O

On their last night on the cruise ship, there wasn't a single thing planned. They had their last dinner together then they snuggled in Rowan's room until it was time for Wo Fat to go. She walked with him to the observation deck, while he checked his phone repeatedly waiting for the boat that was supposed to pick him up.

As they were standing there, he was getting himself all geared up. He had put a harness overtop of his jeans and polo. It was always strange to see him dressed so casually. He got down on bended knee to hook his suitcase up with its own harness and that was when he cleared his throat.

"So, you know… you know you're off the boat tomorrow, correct?"

"Yes, Wo, I have the Itinerary. Disembark by noon, meet Conejo at the drop off. Check in at Atlantis by 4pm. And, so long as you don't have any delays, you'll be there by dinner."

Wo Fat smiled up to her, but she knew that he was worried about leaving her alone. This wasn't the same as leaving her at home in Andalucía, and she had a feeling that after what happened in California, he probably wasn't very comfortable leaving her all on her lonesome. Even if it only was a for a few hours.

"And you'll be alright, right?" he asked her. Rowan, of course, didn't really know the future, but she had a feeling that she could handle this.

"Yes, Wo, I'll be fine. I promise to not cause any trouble."

He stood up and threw his suitcase over the side, clearly to leave it hanging there until the ship arrived.

"I supposed I'm just worried, seeing as Captain Johnny…"

"He hasn't bothered me once today yet. I think he's done with me," she whispered, though she had a feeling that he had something to do with that.

In his pocket the phone chirruped but he didn't bother to look. Instead he just grabbed her. It was so rare that Wo Fat initiated hugs that it almost surprised her a bit. She almost asked him if he was okay. Instead she let him hug her for a little while and then let go when he cleared his throat.

She stepped back and then turned to look down at the darkness though she didn't quite see the boat that was supposed to be moving alongside them.

"So how exactly are you getting down there?"

"I'm gonna jump it."

Rowan looked down to the black fathoms where only a single light proved that a boat was in fact down there waiting for Wo Fat. It looked to be really far down, like forever down.

"I'm pretty sure that will kill you."

Wo Fat turned a glare to her. "I'm obviously going to rappel down, Rowan. Remember you're going to have to toss it overboard when you're done."

"That seems like a waste of money…"

"You have void powers. You can steal us more."

"I'm not supposed to be on anymore heists."

Wo Fat turned yet another dry glare to her and she tried to smile at him. He always got super grumpy when he was worried about her. She put a hand to his shoulder as he swung a leg over the railing.

"I'm going to be okay. All I have to do is take the suitcase down the gang plank and meet Conejo, right?" she asked and he nodded. "See, even I can handle that."

Wo Fat looked down to the dark and then back to her. He was obviously nervous about leaving her and now she was worried too. But if she showed him that he'd stay and risk getting arrested.

"I'm going to be fine. Dinner tomorrow, 7 o'clock, don't be late."

He reached out and pinched her chin. "I'll be there." And then just like that he dropped out of view leaving Rowan alone on the Observation deck. She waited until the rope jerked, four times as per the signal, before she untied it and let it drop below. She couldn't explain it but she had a niggling worry firing up in her chest. She had this feeling that trouble was brewing on the horizon, she just had to hope that she got to Conejo and Wo before it struck.