Poor Unfortunate Souls, Chapter Four: A Great Sadness on Earth.
Chapter Four: A Great Sadness on Earth
Contents and Warnings
Chapter ThreeThey say that a burden shared is a burden halved.
Maybe that’s true for some people: I hope it was true for Sophia. The three of us spent the next two hours on that bench, and Sophia told us all she could bring herself to say. She cried at times, and shook with anger. It’s difficult to describe the depth of the disgust and hatred I felt for Christian Grey as her story continued, revealing the lengths to which he had gone to manipulate and misinform her, but I felt as if I could quite cheerfully sentence him to death for all that he had done to Sophia and at least twelve other young women - I was certain that the twelve “exes” had suffered the same fate - and what he was doing or planning to do to Anastasia Steele.
After the words had run dry and we had given Sophia some time to compose herself, I braced myself for the necessity of asking more questions and hoping that they didn't cause her any more distress.
“Now that we have some evidence of a crime,” I told her, “We’ll be turning our evidence over to the Washington State Police so that they can open an investigation. If you want to remain anonymous, they’ll respect that, though they will probably ask if they can interview you. When they’ve finished their investigation and there is a trial, you can also testify if you want to.”
Sophia nodded. “I… I think that’s what I want,” she said, “to be anonymous. I’ll try to tell them what happened if it will help them save anyone else, but I don’t think I could stand to be in the same courtroom as him.”
[Lindsay Sees the Truth]"And no one can possibly blame you for that,” Allie added definitively. She fished one of our business cards out of her pocket and passed it to Sophia. “Remember that if he contacts you again, call the police, but not before you’ve gone to a safe place with people that you trust. If you ever feel desperate or unsafe, or if you ever need advice, you can also get in contact with us. We can help you take some extra precautions.”
“No, I couldn’t - you should probably just leave it to the police,” Sophia replied earnestly, “If he knew that I’d contacted you -”
“He won’t.” Allie’s voice rang with assurance, and I felt a pang of pride. It was no wonder that people sought her out for their defense and safety, even those who had never seen her commit her whole being to such a task.
“He’ll still go after you if he knows you’re investigating. It’s not safe,” Sophia insisted. Then her eyes flicked towards me worriedly.
“Especially for you, Ms. Pilot -”
“Lindsay,” I corrected automatically.
“- because he really hates blondes.”
I’m afraid my eyebrows tried to crawl up onto my scalp when she said that. “Hates blondes?” I repeated. That had not been next on the list of questions.
Sophia fidgeted a bit. “He mentioned a few times,” she said quietly, “he’s hated blondes since he was adopted. He said the social worker who found him after his mother died was a blonde, and he said that the woman who taught him BDSM was blonde.”
“Did he ever mention that woman’s name?” I asked.
“Elena,” she said. “Elena Lincoln, she owns a spa where he made me go once. I think he did it just to show off how much money he has, but I can’t remember the name.”
“Esclava?” Allie supplied.
“That’s it,” Sophia nodded. “I thought it was really weird that he would bring me to her salon if he hates her so much, but he told me that she gave him the money to start his business, so he repaid her by investing in hers. He did say that she was good for him, but he always said it in a way that made me think he was protecting her for some bizarre reason.”
I made a mental note to advise the police department to look into whether or not Esclava had been used to deposit Sophia’s savings. “We’ll have the police look into her too,” I promised. “Do you know the names of anyone else who might be involved?”
Sophia thought about it for a minute. “He has a bodyguard, or security expert, or something, named Taylor,” she said, “and someone named Welch, who he called when he had a problem with Lelia.”
“Lelia?” I asked, “Who’s Lelia?”
To my surprise, Sophia looked extremely embarrassed and worried. “I don’t actually know,” she admitted, “he was always talking about her though. He said she was the last of a long string of disappointments, whenever he tried to have a long-term relationship. She supposedly went crazy with jealousy over him, almost committed suicide and had to be locked up in a mental institution. At the time, I thought it was just wonderful of him to still be taking care of her, but… If she actually exists, I’m afraid for her.” She shrugged a bit and shot a glance at Allie and me. “I feel really stupid now.”
“Do you know her last name?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, no,” she said. “But I think I know who might. There’s a stylist named Franco who works at Esclava. I’m pretty sure that he’s given all of… of his exes… haircuts.” She smiled wanly. “He was really nice and just… you know, a trustworthy guy. At least, he seemed that way to me, and I guess I can’t always be wrong about that. I think he’ll help the investigation if he can.”
It was back to Esclava then. “Aside from when you e-mailed him about your bank account, have you been in contact with Christian Grey since December?”
“No, I don’t…” Sophia swallowed. “I don’t think so.” She wiped her hands on the thighs of her jeans and looked up into the blue of the late afternoon sky, then pulled out her cell phone. “It’s late,” she said, “I really ought to go home.”
“Will you be all right going home?” Allie asked immediately.
After a second’s hesitation, Sophia nodded. “Yeah. I’ll go back to Antigoni and tell Alexander he can drive on our way home. It’s about time for him to get off anyway, and somebody had better remind him that he hasn’t finished his placement test for calculus. I’ll be fine.”
Sophia stood up and shook hands with Allie. I reached up and slipped my glasses a little lower on my nose before moving forward to shake her hand.
I nearly missed the handshake because of what I saw. Sophia’s aura, which was a warm amber color that put me in mind of autumn honey, was bleeding away from her through a mesh of barbed grey lines that twisted around her like greedy vines. Though I knew it was only my brain making pictures from the energy my eyes saw, I could have sworn that they were digging into her, feeding off her, tearing at her own aura and swallowing it in sticky clumps. I could see a wild shivering of the aura over Sophia’s mouth, as the grey vines crawled over it and were shaken off, but her limbs and torso were covered in them. I tasted copper and iron and despair and saw the sound of nails being dragged down a screaming chalkboard. The vines were always watching, always there, vines made of blood and mouths and veins of fear -
“Are you all right?” Sophia asked, staring at me.
I tried very hard to resume a normal expression, scrambling to push my glasses back up. “I’m all right,” I said, “I… uh… just thought of something.”
The normal expression was apparently a failure. Sophia didn’t look convinced.
“She’s a brilliant detective, but her eureka expression leaves something to be desired,” Allie cut in, placing a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t even bother giving her a dirty look, because I was too busy pushing my glasses back up into position. “If you’re sure that you’ll get home all right, the brilliant detective and I will just head on out to do our investigating, detecting and deducing. You can call us if you have any questions.”
While Sophia waved and headed off down the street, I just stood there, swallowing repeatedly. I knew the nausea was all in my head, but I still tasted iron and the slime of fear was coating the insides of my throat.
Allie watched Sophia turn the corner out of sight, then slipped an arm around my shoulders and steered me a little ways down the street in the opposite direction.
“Still there, Linds?” she asked in a voice she probably meant to be cheerful. I blinked at her and she took her free hand and untwisted a section of my hair from my earpiece. “What did you see?” she asked, urgently.
It took me a minute to make any sound. “You slipped her a protection spell on our business card, I hope?” I asked a bit quaveringly.
“The strongest one I had,” Allie replied, guiding me forward again, “Backed up with a whole lot of righteous anger and a good shot of completely justifiable overkill. If you can walk fast, I think we can catch the bus back to the ferry.” I sped up just at the sound of her voice. “I’d feel better, of course, if we could pull out all the stops and put a huge, Christian Grey excluding ward on her house, but most likely we’d get ourselves arrested.”
“Can you put that kind of ward on a person if they don’t have a very strong aura?” I asked.
“I’d have to do a lot of tweaking, but yeah, probably,” Allie said, “I could base a design off of the ward I put on Evvy’s dog tags - yes, before you say anything, I asked before I started playing around with those, you know she never takes them off - but those really were a best-case scenario, it would be much harder if I couldn’t get my hands on something that the person always had on them. Does this have something to do with what you saw when you looked at Sophia’s aura, or are you just trying to change the subject?”
The bus was just pulling up to its stop, so we ran the last half a block to board it and flopped down in a back seat. Allie glanced around us, and no doubt decided that eavesdropping was unlikely coming from the elderly man reading a newspaper and the teenager who kept pushing his headphones back into his ears when they fell out from nodding to the beat.
“All right, twenty questions is over,” she said. “What did you see?”
I told her. Explaining an aura, especially one that’s being interfered with, is an imprecise business, and usually the primary sense involved is sight, though in a synesthesia-inducing way: if I truly was hearing, smelling, tasting or touching all the things that an aura suggested to me, I’d be able to sense them while wearing my glasses… at least, according to the two people in all the worlds who had any idea of how my extra sense fit into the great and complicated theory of magic. Sophia’s aura was something of an exception in that I knew it wasn’t very strong, but I’d sensed it extremely strongly.
When I was done, Allie looked grim.
“Is he controlling or harming them with magic?” she asked.
“I don’t actually know,” I admitted, “I mean, I’ve seen people who had entwined auras before, but -”
“Entwined is a bit weak of a word,” Allie muttered. “That sounds more like an aura that’s eating hers. His, I suppose. I shouldn’t be this surprised that his aura is a creepy predator.”
I laughed a little desperately. “And it’s a visual pun,” I said, and shook my head. “Christian Grey has a grey aura, I never would have guessed… Look, Allie,” I said, sobering up, “I don’t actually know what it means, or if it’s part of a spell, or if the protection spell will work. I’ve seen some pretty weird auras, and this one is giving me data that I don’t know how to process. It could be natural. It could be her own magic stewing its way through and fighting everything she’s been through - you know that’s when magic kicks in for people with miniscule amounts of latency, when they absolutely need it to survive. We should have brought the tuning fork.”
“Assuming that it wouldn’t just pick you up in preference to some spell stuck to another person’s aura,” Allie replied. “Still, I don’t like it.”
“That makes two of us.”
After the long trip home on the bus and then the ferry, we finally hit the apartment in the light of the early evening, and flipped a coin to determine who “won” the responsibility of phoning the first of our findings in to the police. I’m only about ten percent sure that Allie didn’t rig the toss, but I had plenty of research to be getting on with anyway.
I could hear Allie’s voice in the living room as I lay down across the bed and checked the facts. About half an hour later, I heard the door creak open instead, and looked up to see her leaning against the doorframe.
“And the police?” I asked.
“We can bring the recording in tomorrow,” Allie replied, “It will take them a bit to determine whether or not they can open an investigation, so it sounds as if we’re still on all the other aspects of the case.” She looked down at my computer. “Still researching?”
“Yeah,” I said, scrubbing at my face, “All I’ve really got so far is that whatever Grey thinks he’s doing, it’s not BDSM. Though, the lack of informed consent was the first clue there…”
Allie came over and rested her chin on my shoulder, reading over it. “I didn’t know people did anything that could make them bleed for fun,” she said.
“And here I thought you kept getting yourself in trouble because you enjoy having me patch you up afterwards,” I replied, somewhat grumpily. “The other thing is that the Wikipedia page for BDSM has been edited at least four times in the past three weeks. I can’t exactly tell what the edits were, but the page seems pretty accurate now.”
Allie reached over me, opened a new tab, and brought up Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. To my utter lack of surprise, it had also been edited recently to show the correct information - and the date of its last most recent edit was the same as one of the last four edits to the BDSM page.
“Someone tell me that’s a coincidence,” I sighed.
Chapter 5: To Catch a Shadow
[Notes]* Grey totally would have someone change Wikipedia to misinform potential victims about BDSM. He wouldn't do it himself. I imagine it's Welsh's job.