Where? It had taken me three tries to get the word out. They’d told me where, but I hadn’t traveled a straight line to get there. I’d zig-zagged, from doctor to nurse to PRT staff. I’d asked people who had no cause or reason to know, tried describing her. Asking, asking. Pleading.

Where was she? Had they seen her? Where was the last place anyone saw her? I need—

Where? I shook my head, trying to rattle my brain and get centered in the present. Where was Snag? He’d disappeared into the next room. I stepped forward, feeling unwieldy, and thrust my hand at the door, taking it off of the hinges, damaging the door’s frame. Empty room. Nowhere to be found.

My hand shook from the emotion, extended out in front of me. I clenched it into a fist.

She’d been nowhere to be found too.

I’d arrived alone, no help to offer. Too late to say anything or hear anything from him. I’d choked on my words when it came to saying something to his parents. There’d been this feeling like I couldn’t react the way I’d wanted and needed to, because his parents were there and they were somehow maintaining their composure. Upset, yes, but they were wealthy and dignified enough they would do their crying in private. They had weathered their losses years before and it had been the same then, according to Dean. Now it was on Dean’s behalf.

What options did that leave me? Break down into hysterical sobbing and act like I was hurting more than his own family was? It might have been dismissed as the drama of a teenager and I hadn’t wanted that to be the final note on Dean and me, in their eyes, in the eyes of bystanders.

Like I imagined anyone in a relationship did, I’d wondered if we were in love, and then I’d known we were in love, and I’d grown close enough to him to wonder if he was a soulmate, dismissed the term just as easily as it had come up because it was silly and it didn’t matter either way, did it? I’d received my answer on the question as I’d felt a part of me die during those long minutes of me trying and failing to say something to his family.

From that to home. Southwest end of the city, our house mostly untouched by the attack. To Dad being ‘impaired’, Mom’s word, and Mom being business as usual, emphasis on business, because that was how she dealt.

To… a family member acting like they’d been replaced by a fucking pod person from another planet, gradually realizing that replacement had been a long time ago, and it was only now in context and crisis that I’d seen the alien-ness clearly, in the then-present and in retrospect.