Poor Unfortunate Souls, Chapter Three: Love is not a Panacea
Chapter Three: Love is not a Panacea
Contents and Warnings
Chapter 2
Chapter Specific Warnings: some discussion of rape, stalking, gaslighting, emotional, financial, and psychological abuse, and PTSD all around.
I was woken in the early hours of the morning by Allie sitting up in bed beside me.
“Allie?” I asked, probably incomprehensibly.
“Where are we?”
My heart sank. “Seattle Washington,” I said, “The USA, Earth. In bed in our apartment, where we’ve lived for almost a month now.” That might not have been the clearest explanation ever, but it was half-past-stupid o’clock and my brain still wasn’t working properly.
Allie conjured a light and the room was suddenly both visible, though fuzzy on the edges, and faintly tinted in blue. She looked around suspiciously, and I reached over to her hand, working my fingers between hers. I could feel the wild drumbeat of her pulse slow down as she recognized the room and lay back down, the light dying as she did so.
“I can’t remember,” she said, “are we still following him, or was that another nightmare?”
“He’s dead,” I said. You know this. “He has been for three years now, and he’ll never hurt anyone again.” The damage already done was more than enough to be going on with. Allie hadn’t truly believed she was still hunting another adept since we’d come to Seattle, but given the kind of case we were working on, I should have been more prepared. I should have. I could try to excuse myself because I’d been tired, but I should have seen the warning signs. It’s not like I didn’t know how to be armed against this sort of thing.
She seemed to believe me, despite her confusion. “I dreamed that the skull he had with him was telling us how to fight him,” she said, slowly, “but… I’m not a necromancer, so that’s impossible. And besides, you weren’t with me when - are you sure you’re real?”[Sophia remembers the past]
“Pretty sure,” I replied.
“Then stop blaming yourself,” Allie said. “I think I remember the new case, and I know you’re thinking that we never should have taken it.”I looked at her sharply in the darkness and saw nothing but the muted glow of her aura, which illuminated nothing. Nonetheless, she went on.
“I did agree to this case, remember. I knew what it was about, and that’s why we have to take it: we’ve got to do our best to help those who need it -”
“And our best is better than most,” I finished for her. No, I hadn’t been thinking that we should never have taken the case: I’d been thinking that Allie should never have been involved in it, as impossible as that was.
She leaned her head against my shoulder and I could feel her smile. “Aedifex, but I hope you’re not another dream,” she mumbled. I couldn’t say that I hoped the same. If only none of this was real… “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said after a moment of silence.
“Prove to me you’re really here.”
Someday my well of unshared knowledge would run dry, but I hoped that by then we wouldn’t need it anymore. Hopefully we would stop needing it before I scraped the bottom of the happy memories and had to cast out across the nights of the past for the secrets I once kept in silence.
And maybe someday I would somehow dredge up new, good memories from the muck, and remember the bitter with the sweet.
“Well,” I said after a while, “tell me if you already knew this, but the day I met you, I still had my very first library card.”
“For… what, eleven years?” she asked.
“I’m good at hanging on to things,” I replied.
I’m just bad at hanging on to people.
After a while, research tends to blend together. A large amount of what we truly needed had to be found online, but over the next couple of days we started to find a pattern that was helpful, despite being disturbing. It was actually due to a personal fashion blog that we managed to identify the first photo.
“Thank goodness for shallow people,” I said when I finally found a name. “And for people who will post photographs of anybody who has enough money.”
“Believe it or not, Lindsay,” Allie said from where she was draped over the couch working on the same digital trail from a different angle, “there are women in the world who are attracted to redheaded CEO’s in stupidly expensive suits, rather than smartass nerds with cute librarian glasses.”
The important thing was that four most recent photos had names: Sophia Colonomos, Madeline Fisher, Bianca Fiorenti, and Alice Wu. All four of them had gone to area colleges sometime in the past two years, and had been somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty three. Each of them had brown hair and a small frame. In their photos with Christian, they wore piles of makeup and revealing dresses, but on their own facebook profiles they were more likely to wear t-shirts and pose with pets, art projects, or plastic dinosaurs. Sophia, Madeline, and Bianca all currently had no activity on their facebook profiles: Alice had deleted hers, and seemingly hadn’t used her MySpace since some time in high school. Together we scrolled through the messages on Sophia’s wall that had been left since March. They got increasingly sparser as they headed into May, but a few dedicated friends kept going.
Hey, you still alive, Soph?
Call Me!
R U gonna be at graduation?
If you’re still planning on taking chem. 201 next year, I have a textbook to sell.
Are you even on campus?
Hey Soph, if you’re not on because you’re feeling blue, have a baby ocelot video. It’s better than a kitten video.
JSYK, the stuff you left in the room is now in my parents’ garage. Come get it whenever. I know you want your Iron Man poster back.
Seriously. Call Me.
The story was close to the same on the other pages, though activity had stopped earlier for Madeline and even earlier for Bianca, close to the same time as they’d last been seen in public with Grey. In the meantime, we’d run against two brick walls in the financial search: the fact that Mr. Lincoln was currently engaged in suing his ex-wife, and the fact that Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc was undergoing “fiscal reorganization,” whatever that meant. In the end, our only lead was an old facebook post of Sophia’s, advertizing for “half off gyros at my aunt Louisa’s restaurant, Antigoni!” and helpfully giving us the address in the middle of Silverdale.
It was a long shot, but it was a lead, so we found ourselves headed into Silverdale to ask uncomfortable questions and hopefully not get kicked out of Antigoni before we had a chance to try the food.
The plan had been to work into the questions gently, but directly if we could get the aunt to talk to us, relying on Allie’s natural air of authority to delay any questions as to why we were asking. We were hoping that a near-decade of experience in asking the right questions at the right time in the right tone of voice might lead us to the next link in the chain.
The plan had reckoned without Louisa Galantis. The restaurant wasn’t that crowded, since it was almost two on a weekday by the time we got there, but the staff made up in energy for the sparse number of patrons. When we arrived, there were three tables filled with elderly couples, two truckers, and a small handful of high school students, who looked to have finished their food some time ago and were currently playing paper football with a napkin. The only other person in the room was a college-aged waitress with a nametag that read Lena, who bustled forward to take our order.
“Actually, we’re here to speak to Mrs. Louisa Galantis,” Allie said before she could ask us if we wanted a table or a booth.
Lena looked between the two of us rapidly, “Mom’s probably busy in back, but I can pop in and ask her if she has a minute. Are you with the newspaper?”
“No,” Allie said with a smile.
About three minutes and one hallway cheerfully papered in gigantic sunflowers later, we found ourselves in the neatly filed back room of Antigoni, facing a plump woman in her early fifties with an impressive collection of laugh lines. She rose from her desk to shake our hands.
“How can I help you today, misses…?”
“Aliea Veldon and Lindsay Pilot,” Allie replied immediately, while I offered an encouraging sort of smile. “We were hoping you had the time to answer some questions about your niece, Sophia Colonomos.”
The friendly expression got wiped off Luisa’s face like rain off a windshield. “Alexander,” she called through the open door, “these two ladies are in the wrong place: please show them out.”
In the doorway behind us, a young man who was clearly heavily involved in a sport that required weightlifting shuffled into view.
“You see, we went to school with Sophia and we’ve started to get worried -” I started, but Luisa snorted.
“As what, graduate students?” she asked sharply. “That school never brought her anything but pain. If you were really her friends you should respect that she needs her own space and that she has decided not to go back. Now go.” She put her hands on her hips and Alexander shuffled back in the doorway, giving us a route out. We stayed where we were.
“We don’t mean to disturb her,” I said conciliatingly, “but we believe that if you could answer a few questions it might help her, and someone else.”
That was when Luisa got angry. “Then you can tell him to go fuck a porcupine,” she snarled, “And get out of my restaurant.” She strode forward and we found ourselves being herded from the room, then down the hall, before either of us could formulate a reply. In fact, we escaped from the back door of the restaurant in under a minute, drawing surprised looks from everyone we passed.
“We’re detectives!” Allie shouted to Alexander as he was about to slam the door behind us. “We’re hired to stop Christian Grey!”
He paused for half a second, then the door was shut a little less forcefully than it could have been. It was still hard enough to be considered a slam, though.
Allie and I stood in the back parking lot under a row of Chinese lanterns, at a literal dead end. There was stunned silence for a moment, where I fiddled with the chain of the key around my neck, then Allie spoke.
“I think it’s about time for us to stop pretending to be students,” she said.
I rolled my eyes at her as we started around the building to the front parking lot, taking our time. I had been hoping to have a real, tangible lead to follow, and I was just sighing over the fact that I didn’t, when I heard a door slam behind us. I turned around first, and almost immediately saw a familiar face who I had never actually met.
We all stood there for a moment while Sophia finished taking off her apron.
“Is it true?” she asked us, still hovering by the door, “that you’re hired to stop him? Or did you just say that so my brother wouldn’t throw you out?”
“Yes,” I said, “we’re going to try, anyway.”
Sophia walked a little closer to us, but not much. “That’s good,” she said, slowly, “he… he needs to be stopped. Just don’t, don’t ever go near him, he’s…” She stopped, and took a deep breath. “I might sound crazy, but if there’s any chance that he’s with anyone again, you need to make them leave him. If -” there was a hitch in her voice, “if it will help, I’ll tell you what happened. Though, if you are detectives, I’d rather you didn’t - I mean, this can be confidential, right?”
Allie and I agreed simultaneously.
Approximately half an hour later, Sophia had gotten her aunt’s permission to leave work for the day and the three of us were sitting on a bench under the trees behind the Silverdale library in relative quiet. After a brief explanation as to why it would be best for us to record her story, Sophia agreed, turned on the voice recorder herself, and then stared at it for a good three minutes before she started to speak. At first the story unfolded in tiny pieces, but then, after a few false starts, it all tumbled out.
“I thought he was the best thing to ever happen to me,” Sophia admitted, staring at her hands while Allie and I tried to give her and her story the right amount of space. “I met him when our school had a food drive to support his feed Darfur campaign, and it turned out I was the only member of our school service club who both had a car and the time to drive the boxes of donations to his office building. At first I thought he was just interested in the club, but then I figured out that he was looking at me, and I… I mean, I honestly hadn’t known who he was before that, but I was so flattered to be the center of his attention. He just… he had this way about him of being so set against the world, and he always said that it was him and me against everyone else. I guess looking back I was pretty stupid, but it only took about a week before I decided to go along with dating him in secret and… and the other things.” She blushed, and fiddled with her hair a bit before she continued.
“I didn’t really know what I was getting into.” She said, in a quiet, strained voice, “I’d never really had a boyfriend before. Growing up in Silverdale, I just already knew everyone in school and, well, aside from those roller-skating dates in middle school, it just never happened. I never got asked. Boys were always looking at Lena, and not me. So I… I really thought he loved me.”
There were tears forming in her eyes, so I dug a kleenex out of the pack in my purse and passed it to her before she could start crying in earnest. She seemed to take it as a challenge to keep it together, and spoke very quickly. “He said that I was the only one he’d ever loved, that I was everything he’d been looking for, if I only understood how lonely he’d been I’d… but he didn’t care, not really. And I was just - so stupid - for believing him and after everything I just froze up inside and let it all happen, even after I told him I didn’t want it any more he kept sending me presents and then he broke the lock off my dorm room door when I didn’t let him in - I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense.”
“It’s okay,” I said, a bit uselessly.
“Take your time,” Allie added.
She nodded. “He… well, he said the law was on his side, he’d given me a contract about the things he’d like to do in bed, a bunch of information on something he called BDSM that he wanted to try for three months, but I never signed it. I said I’d think about it and I’d let him know. All I ever did was sign his non-disclosure agreement. But he took me out on his boat that one night and… and I didn’t even remember what happened until later, after he’d just dumped me at the end of the semester when the three months were up, without a word, after he’d taken my old truck because he said it was too dangerous for me and he’d rather I had a nice safe car - I just stopped being able to go to class. Everybody, I thought everybody knew, and that everyone was judging me for being as sick as him, being with him, not being good enough -”
Sophia paused and blew her nose. “I remember in - I think it was the end of January, after classes started up again - this graffiti appeared on the wall of my dorm on campus. It called me a slut and then I… I found out that I was failing half of my classes, I’d go to class and not be able to remember which class it was or what I was supposed to be doing, and my roommate took me to Wal-Mart to get ice cream and I found out that my checking account was frozen, and then I remembered that he had my bank account number along with the ones of the other twelve girls -”
There was the next link, I thought.
“ - and then it turned out that there was no money in my account at all. I sent him an e-mail, demanding to know what in hell he was doing with my money, but his only response was that if my bank wasn’t safe, it was a pity that I never signed the contract, because he would have found me a better banking service. He said that if I was still with him, I’d never need money. That it was my fault for not giving him what he needed -”
“Do you still have this e-mail?” I interrupted as gently as I could.
She nodded. “I think so. I deleted the second one, though - he sent another one when I didn’t reply, telling me that if I continued to - to defy him, he’d come and teach me my place again. I threw all my stuff in a bag and came home that night.”
I could see that her hands were shaking as she blew her nose again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stuffing the Kleenex and her hands between her knees, not looking at either of us. “I don’t want to burden you with all my troubles. I thought I could say this more sensibly, but I didn’t really know why I’d panicked and run home until just a few weeks ago, really, because I could still remember when he’d sworn that he was in love with me. I - at the time, I thought that I could help him. He’d told me enough about his childhood that I felt sorry for him, and he convinced me that he loved me and that I was in love with him. I thought he needed saving from his anger, from his terrible past, and so I couldn’t understand why I was so afraid of him.” Sophia’s voice got smaller and smaller as she spoke.
“I didn’t remember that he’d raped me.”
Chapter Four: A Great Sadness on Earth[Notes]
* I really am sorry that this became so much about my own characters, but I originally picked them because they’d have strong reactions to the situation, and because I wanted characters I knew really well to kick Grey’s ass.
** I’m from the Chicago area, so there’s a lot of family-run Italian and sometimes Greek restaurants where I live, but I did check that there are Greek and Italian restaurants in Silverdale. (There are.) Yeah, I named Sophia’s Aunt’s restaurant after Antigone… my Greek doesn’t go as far as my Latin or Spanish, I’m afraid.
*** I don’t think BDSM is sick. I think Grey is sick. Sophia doesn’t have the ability to differentiate the two right now.
**** Sophia’s schedule and college information is based on Evergreen State College, selected on the basis that it was the closest state college to Silverdale and its schedule fit my timeline nicely. Repression of memories, as well as trouble processing short-term into long term memory, are symptoms of PTSD.
Fuck this chapter, guys. This and Lelia’s chapter were the hardest to write.