It’s funny how after all this searching, intent looking for a sign that any of these people are left, now that she’s only got one name on the list she’s tempted to stop. The entire list had been gone through from the top – an order put in there mostly at random, or at least seemingly-so, though partly it’s people she’d have been less devastated to have lost going first, just in case (and that makes her sounds like the most terrible person ever, doesn’t it?) – and now there’s just that one name on the list, and she’s really, really scared to go any further. Everyone else is dead. Aaron probably is too – so why check?
Except she doesn’t know that he is. And, hey, maybe he stayed safe in the labs and never got hurt and then he never died? Except that’s almost completely unrealistic and naïve and and and… And if he is dead, she sort of needs to know, right? At least then she wouldn’t have to keep wondering?
And the fact that her stomach is doing all kinds of painful gymnastics as she starts typing his name into the crazy green-and-black spy-movie screen on her computer (which she’d been shocked to know actually existed, and more shocked to realize she’d gotten to) is just …preparing herself for the bad news that’s totally going to come even though she doesn’t want it to. It’s not hope or terror or any of that, because she’s cool now, right? She’s been doing this for a week and she should be used to seeing the word “deceased” pop up at the end of a long string of useless information whenever she tries to find someone. She ignores the part of her that informs her that if she ever did get used to that, she’d be a terrible person.
Despite the fact that she’s trying really hard not to freak out even as she’s typing the letters into the screen, hitting enter is easy. Well, not easy – but it’s easier than it should be. Something big and life altering like this, and all she has to do is hit a silly button on the keyboard. The soft little click it makes is almost mocking the way she’s probably going pale and is reaching over for her coffee (she’d bribed the library’s computer guy with five bucks to let her keep it in there – he’d agreed, if she promised to keep a lid on it and be careful, which she did) as if it’s going to help when the little green “searching…” goes away and brings back some results.
It takes a while, this weird program that’s not actually a program but more like some kind of hack to get into… some… place that has files that people think are hidden on the internet. It takes a long time to load the results it gets – or to find results, maybe. Like, a bajillion years or maybe just that many minutes instead (because years is exaggerating a little bit probably). And the library is so freaking picky – she only gets an hour a day, and this has taken a week so far, getting all these names checked...
She’s always managed to get this computer, so far – it’s monitor is facing the corner, so no one can actually see what she’s doing very easily. And when they wander over, she opens up a game of Solitaire because it’s fun and diverting and people think she’s just some chick playing card games on a library computer and never suspect she’s doing some kind of crazy top-secret spy-movie stuff. It’s not like her – she looks like the type who’d have noooo freaking idea how to do this… and, really, she doesn’t.
Except apparently she does. Somehow. She can remember what he taught her forever ago, even though at the time she didn’t understand it (at all), and now that she actually had to use it, it just sort of …works. Somehow. Which is …weird.
…But she’s pretty sure the computer isn’t supposed to make that clicking noise. Sounds like something’s…. moving inside it. Also, um, is it supposed to radiate that much heat?
The screen flickers and then fades out, and her jaw drops, the coffee in her hand slipping from her hand and spilling all over the floor and her lap (oww!) and the keyboard, and she stands up in a hurry to try to clean it up, throwing her jacket over the keyboard and it’s puddle of coffee in an attempt to either absorb the coffee or at least hide it from the computer guy coming this way.
There’s a smell coming from the computer, and she leans over and looks at it. Thin, pale- gray smoke is rising from the tower, and she makes a face in disgust. Okay, so …normal computers probably aren’t designed for Top Secret Super Spy Programs. Noted. She’ll totally remember that in the future.
And now she’s running off, grabbing her jacket (coffee dripping from at least one area, ew! Not that the coffee is gross, in general, but that coffee now has keyboard dust and junk in it, so, um, yeah, ew) and her cup (because she needs that!) the slip of paper on the desk as goes, brushing past the computer guy who, at the sight of the smoke and her fleeing form, sort of throws up his hands and looks dismayed and somewhat confused (apparently people don’t usually destroy computers here?), and she tosses a quick “Sorry!” over her shoulder as she goes, not stopping the running until she’s out of the library parking lot. They probably won’t chase her this far, so it should be safe to just walk from here.
…And she still doesn’t know if he’s alive or not. That realization makes her feel a little sick, even though at the moment she should logically be more preoccupied with trying to run in these shoes and the fact that her only jacket is currently dripping dust-ridden coffee all over as she’s running away from destroying a computer in a public library because she was doing all kinds of sophisticated searching for restricted files she shouldn’t even know exist. But somehow that’s not distracting enough, apparently.
She heads back to her motel (which is a gross and bug-infested sort of place, all dark and dingy and weird and the sort of place where you’re not sure if the water is safe to drink, or even safe to brush your teeth with, and the TV gets two channels (news and old re-run game shows from like prehistoric times with people on them that are probably either dead or decrepit and on their way to dying), but has a long list of Pay-Per-View (the titles of which alone are eye-bleedingly gross and scary), and there’s weird red-tinted stains on the floor and the wall, and she tells herself they’re from wine or spaghetti sauce or something and couldn’t possibly be blood (or that if it is, she’s got a stake, so she should be okay. Probably. Maybe), which isn’t far from the library, thankfully.
Walking and stuff in these shoes should be illegal. Actually, it might be, with the way these heels could totally be weapons and all… Too bad they were the first ones she could find back when she’d took off. Her other boots would have been so much nicer for this!
Tomorrow she’ll have to get out of town. She should have enough money for bus fare and another motel room. Maybe two more. And she could always grab a job for a few weeks, if she has to. Next town should have a library. One search shouldn’t blow up another computer…
As she drops onto the bed (after glancing around the room to make sure there aren’t any bugs right now; probably they’re all waiting for the lights to go out before they come after her), she isn’t sure if she wants to try again. She could just …start over. Again. Again-again. And maybe this time she can be more careful. Maybe.
Though that last time, she hadn’t had a clue it was going wrong until it …went wrong. Split second and then things were scary and she freaked and ran again. She’s good at that – right up there in her skills list with making coffee and talking a lot. Not good at literally running (she’s not, actually – faster than some people, sure, but that’s just because she does it all the freaking time – but she’s usually wearing terrible shoes for it and runs out of breath before she gets as far as she’d like), but at dropping off the face of the earth. She’s been doing it since she was a kid…
And there’s a direction she’s not going in right now. Nope. Not even a little bit. She sits up and flicks on the TV, to the old game shows (because it’s the lesser of the two evils), just for noise, and then throws her legs over the bed and kicks her shoes off.
It feels like a cycle, this life. Starting over always starts with running out of money, staying in some gross motel, trying to figure out where to go next. And then she gets on her way, starts having a normal life, and then it breaks and can’t be fixed and then she’s back here. Well, not here exactly, but somewhere like it – they all look a lot alike after awhile.
She pointedly isn’t thinking about how she could have prevented this from happening (so very many ways, some leading back years and years). Isn’t. At all. She’s made it a point to never think about that, except in the sense that she thinks about what not to do next time – anything beyond that is …not forgotten exactly, but pushed aside.
She decides it’s time to brave the bathroom and get a shower so she can get the coffee off herself (because while coffee is good, being covered in it is not). She’ll have to wash her clothes in there, too – there’s no washer or dryer in this sort of place. Good thing they provide robes, though (and she thinks they’re probably clean. Hopefully, anyway), ‘cause she totally doesn’t have anything else to wear right now.
Stupid vampires.
She grabs one of her shoes, and edges towards the bathroom, flicking the light on as soon as the door is pushed open, holding the shoe high, ready to fight off any invaders – insect or otherwise.
--
Searching….
Anna taps her fingers against the flimsy desk, all nervous and scared and choking back that spark of hope that tries to swell up, because getting her hopes up is a bad, bad idea. Really bad. Like, epically bad times five bajillion and sixty-three. Because if everyone else is dead, he probably is too. It just makes sense that way, as horrible as it is and as much as she’d really like it not to. She should be dead too, would be if she were there probably, right?
Search complete. Loading results…
She fidgets in her chair, chewing on her lip absently, hands reaching over towards where her cup of coffee sits, only to back away after picking up an empty cup – dang. She’d totally been drinking coffee all day, and now it’s gone and she really, really could use some right now, to help calm her down. Which is silly how that works, but it does, even though it also makes her hyperactive and bouncing off the walls.
Showing 43 of 43 files found.
She scrolls the screen to the bottom, closing her eyes as she does. …Not that she’ll be able to see it with her eyes closed or anything. Which makes the entire point of this totally nonexistent.
Okay, eyes open. …Open. No, that’s not open. …There we go.
…There’s the end of the data. The last word is…
…that’s not “deceased”. That’s… definitely not. That’s a date – a last sighted date. And it isn’t that long ago. Well, it’s like months old, but it’s not years! So that means he might possibly still be alive!
She pokes at the keyboard absently, fighting the huge grin off her face (because she really shouldn’t keep her hopes up, even if there’s no official death record which means he might actually still be alive and she might be able to find him) and trying to remember where to go from here. She hasn’t had to do this for the others, so it’s sort of new. No, it is new, aside from forever ago when she listened with one ear to the “boring computer stuff” he was trying to teach her… and how much of that went in one ear and out the other remains to be seen.
She absently touches the side of the computer, to see how hot it is. Having another one sorta-explode like that would be bad, especially right now! It’s not too hot, though – at least, she doesn’t think it is? Anyway, she’ll have to do this fast – her hour is almost up.
Searching up the date and the name combined comes up with a traffic camera’s results – a black-and-white image of him, and she can’t help but try to study the somewhat blurry image to see if it’s really him… and it really, really looks like him. Different, of course, but still him, and she quickly prints the page out and continues, folding the picture and stuffing it in the pocket of her jacket.
The location is “undisclosed”, officially. She mumbles under her breath, trying to recall and recite (all sing-songy and childishly) whatever it was he taught her about getting around that. Something about a crack in the wall …or maybe broken …things… with… holes in them..? Something about a ninja?
Yeah, really not a very good listener. Ever. Though if she finds him, she’s totally going to have to make him re-teach all this to her, because it really actually is helpful, and she’d really never thought it would be back then. Not in a million years. But apparently a million years is actually shorter than she’d thought.
The computer’s feeling a bit hotter than she thinks they’re supposed to. She makes a face and pokes at the keyboard, typing in commands to the program ranging from “find address” to “why don’t you like me you mean, mean, horrible computer?!” and all sorts of things in between. Nothing.
The computer’s sound, that low hum that all computers generally make when active, seems to have gotten… higher in pitch. Not exactly a good thing, probably? She makes a face, scribbles the date she’d gotten down, and then closes the program, careful to close whatever program secret door-things she’d opened to get in there… or at least trying to be? Hopefully she’s doing it right – but it’s a lot easier to get out than to get in, at least.
Solitaire pops back up, and she quickly finishes the game (well, does whatever she can with her cards and then loses and closes it before it officially tells her she’s lost, because that way it’s like she just got bored with it, didn’t actually lose, because losing isn’t cool), and then logs out of the computer.
Tomorrow she’ll get back in there, try again. Hopefully she’ll be able to get somewhere, find a location – even the general area is a start, and maybe she can ask around or something? Carefully, though. Drawing attention would be bad. Very, very bad. Especially if he’s still around and she brings attention to him…
She absently wonders, as she walks back to the latest motel she’s taken up residence in, if there’s still a Resistance anymore. If he’s still part of it. With everyone dead, it’s hard to know, really. Did he ever even want the normal stuff like she did? Daylight that didn’t involve sleeping off another creepy night and a normal job and day-to-day life without the imminent threat of being a vampire’s dinner? She’d never really thought about it, because he’d seemed pretty happy where he was…
Then again, she’d probably seemed pretty happy where she was, too. And she had been, really – mostly, at least. But she’d gotten scared, and thought she knew best, and the best idea at the time was the one she’d always had – run. So she ran, and she’s still at it.
And somehow when she’d thought about living a normal life, before, running hadn’t ever entered the equation. It’d been something she expected to stop when she’d gotten somewhere “safe”, somewhere normal. But even now she can’t seem to stop, at least not for very long.
And if she’s going to run all the time, she might as well run to something, instead of away, for once, right?
--
She’s really not sure how she ended up getting the information she has out of that computer. She’s pretty sure she might have sold her soul or something to get it to work – and now she’s got a piece of paper with an address scrawled on it in her terrible handwriting – an address where she may (or may not, she reminds herself – no need to get her hopes up) actually find Aaron, and she wants to get there as soon as humanly possible to find out.
She has no idea what she plans to say when she sees him – really, no idea at all. It’ll probably be something stupid, knowing her. And she’s like a hundred percent sure it’ll be awkward, because he probably thinks she’s dead. That was the idea, wasn’t it? And if he didn’t think she was dead, he’d probably have been able to find her even if she had been being careful, because that’s how he is. Because if she found him using what she barely remembered from what he taught her, he’d be able to find her if he looked (maybe not for the first year, because then she was paranoid and using fake names and being really, really careful, but after that, she’d stopped being so paranoid, she probably has records after that, somewhere).
She has no idea how he’s going to react, or how she’s going to explain it, or …anything like that at all.
…Shoot, she probably should have planned ahead a little, huh? This bus ride isn’t going to be much longer (except that somehow it’s too long, too) and there won’t be time for that – when she gets there it’ll be late afternoon and there’s no way she’s going to be out after dark, so she has to find him as soon as possible.
She hopes he won’t have changed too much – hopes he’ll still be the Aaron she knew, not someone with the same face (…ish; he did look somewhat different in that picture she found, but it was also pretty blurry, so it’s hard to be sure) who acts completely different… but it’s been years. It’s probably asking a lot for him to not have changed over that time, especially since he’s the only one of the group who’s alive…
But she doesn’t want to think about him being different. At all. Because different might not always mean bad, but it usually seems to, and bad is definitely nothing like good at all. It’s the opposite, and she doesn’t like things that aren’t at least a little bit good.
She drops her head against the window of the vehicle and tugs her feet up onto the seat beside her, repositioning so her foot stops being numb. No one’s next to her, thankfully – actually there are only a handful of people on the bus, including herself. She likes the space – sometimes these rides are crowded and annoying for that. Today she gets to think, even though at the same time she’d sort of rather not think, because she keeps coming back to annoying stupid bad thoughts and she doesn’t like those.
One of those stupid thoughts that keeps coming up, time after time after freaking time, is why did I leave in the first place? …which she already knows the answer to, so thinking it is really annoying, and sort of like her brain wants her to come up with a better answer than what she has, and there isn’t one, and that’s really frustrating. She’d wanted to be normal, isn’t that good enough of a reason?
…Why is it she really wants to answer no to that? It’s perfectly acceptable to be tired of the creepy and the undead and the never-seeing-daylight because of being too busy sleeping through it so as to be up all night… It’d been fun sometimes, sure, but then people started dying and that was scary and it could have been her and she really, really didn’t want to die, and maybe that’s selfish but it’s understandable right?
…Why she left isn’t important, she reminds herself – she’s coming back now. That’s what matters, right?
Annoyed by all the stupid drama her brain is throwing at her (since when is it this persistent about anything except getting her daily requirement of caffeine or sidetracking itself every three seconds even when she tries to focus?), she closes her eyes and tries to fall asleep. She’s got maybe another hour or two, and she could totally use a nap right about now. Sun’s still out, and the bus doesn’t stop for passengers until she’s getting off, so obviously the handful of people on here aren’t vampires (and if they are they’re really resilient in all this sunlight) so sleeping is probably okay…
--
Opting not to get a taxi or anything from the bus station was probably a smart idea, since she’s sort of getting low on money – but it’s definitely frustrating because walking a few miles in these shoes is harder than it should be, and while the daylight is holding, she’s still jumpy – only a few more hours until it gets dark.
Not that it’ll take hours to find the place… or, hopefully not, anyway? She’s only got an address and the vague directions to the general area, given to her by that random taxi driver she’d turned down a lift from, to go on, and she’s never been good with directions… at all…
Actually it only takes about one hour to locate and arrive at the street on the paper, and she’s aware that she’s ridiculously nervous, getting more-so the closer she gets (or the closer she feels she’s getting?). Trying to reason it away isn’t working, ‘cause the more she thinks about why she’s nervous, the more nervous she gets, because she has every logical reason to be, and she doesn’t like that, which just makes it worse.
And then part of her is overwhelmingly excited to see Aaron again. She’s aware that she’s already got her hopes up way too high, probably, but there’s not much she can do about that, and at least it’s partially distracting from the unease, right?
…. Those numbers match the address on the paper. She stops in front of the building, looking at it as if it’s some kind of treasure chest she totally just dug up, and in a way she supposes it is – she had to track it down and find it, and she has no idea what’s inside, and it could either be really good or really disappointing, only this treasure is a person (the idea of shoving a person into a treasure chest is both amusing and creepy, she decides, then dismisses the thought before she gets sidetracked), which means she should probably open it before there’s suffocation or something, right?
Only, that doesn’t make any sense at all, since it’s not actually a treasure chest, and it’s a building, and buildings are generally ventilated alright, and he’s probably been in there (if he is at all, she reminds herself) longer than a minute or two anyway, but before she’s really had time to get too nervous to go in she’s got one hand on the doorknob and she’s pushing it open and peering inside, and she crosses her the fingers of one hand absently as she steps inside, because supposedly that’s some kind of good luck for some reason she’s never actually understood, but maybe it’ll help ‘cause she thinks she could really use some right now…
A bell over the door jingles when she pushes it open, and she glances up at it for a second, sort of startled because she didn't expect anything to announce her arrival, and she isn't sure she's ready for anyone to see her yet, and... whatever, it's just a bell. No big deal. And if she didn't want to be seen yet she probably could have just stood outside indesicively for the next twenty minutes or forever, but she came in so she might as well get used to being noticed.
And, uh, holy crap. Holy freaking crap, that's Aaron. He's alive, he's right here and he's alive and... and she has nothing to say. Well, no, she has a lot to say - like, probably way too much, because she's always been really good at having a million words - but none of it... actually wants to come out. It's like she's been struck dumb, maybe, or more like her brain just conked out now that she's accomplished her goal of finding him...
"So, uh, hi," she squeaks, which is like so pathetic she's not even going to think about it, "Uh."