eleanor taft → helena bertinelli (callmehuntress) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2020-10-11 21:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | eleanor taft, spencer lazarus, victoria cross |
Who: Eleanor & Spence (with a side of Victoria)
What: She's trying to find her brother & Spence is her only hope
Where: Blue Rose Investigations in Chicago, IL
When: Backdated to Wednesday, September 9th, 2020
Warnings: Nothing major, except perhaps some Big Emotions
The last two months had been hell for Eleanor. The last five months, really. Actually, if we're being honest, the last fifteen years, but this time was already different from all those other times for one very simple reason. Whenever there was something wrong before, whether it was something wrong with her or someone else, she'd always had Aaron. Aaron, her twin brother, who she'd been separated from before but not like this. Never like this. Even when he'd gone off to college, they'd talked often, and seen each other whenever they could. It was rare that he ever missed a call from her and even on the extremely unlikely occasion that he did, he always called her back. Always.
But he hadn't called her back this time.
It was two days before their birthday, and that was another sign that something was out of place. No return call, nothing. The big day came and went. Even when he was away at college, they'd never spent a birthday apart from each other. Turning twenty-eight, while not nearly as monumental as turning thirty, was still another birthday for the two of them to celebrate. Even now. Especially now. Though Eleanor didn't feel much like celebrating anything these days and Aaron very likely felt the same, it wasn't going to be a day she'd miss being with him for anything short of an untimely death. God forbid, considering the still all too recent death of their father just a few short months ago.
And that was what Eleanor feared most. It was the thing that she tried so desperately not to think about every day that had passed since the beginning of August with no word from him, and at the same time it was the thing she kept trying to convince herself couldn't possibly be true because she would feel it. If Aaron was really dead, she would know it in her bones. People always scoffed at the twin connection, even their parents to some extent, but Eleanor knew it was true and so did Aaron. At the end of the day, it was the only thing she really believed in anymore since Eleanor had never been one for religion. Aaron was missing, he wasn't dead, and she wouldn't stop until she found him.
He'd been missing now for over two months. Something like seventy-four days since she'd called him and never heard back? The longest two months of her life. It wasn't enough that they'd already so recently had to bury their father and deal with the shock of their mother abandoning them, now Eleanor had been abandoned altogether. Except she knew that Aaron would never abandon her, not without good reason. Not unless he had no other choice. So where was he? And why hadn't he tried to contact her by now? Ever since their father's murder and their mother's disappearance, Aaron had been hellbent to uncover the truth of what happened, Eleanor knew that. The idea that something might have happened to him because he went looking for answers was almost unbearable, but it was an idea she had to at least entertain as the most likely option. The Taft family had seen better days.
She pulled the teal overcoat she was wearing more closely around herself as she walked down the block towards her final destination. A chill was finally starting to settle in New York and Chicago's weather wasn't much different so she hadn't had to change clothes once off the MTN like she had in some of the other places she'd visited more recently. Her search for Aaron had taken her all over now that she had access to modes of transportation that, before a month ago, she hadn't even known existed. Becoming a reincarnate in the middle of all this was overwhelming to say the least, but it had given her an advantage when it came to covering more ground. It's what had led her to the women she'd met in Pittsburgh who had given her the number of a private investigator in Chicago. At that point Eleanor was fed up with the police doing nothing in her eyes to actually try and find her brother, and from what the woman had said, this man had a good reputation for finding people that were lost. Or at least, Eleanor hoped that was the case. She was not a person who ever gave much stock in hope, but it was Aaron, and she didn't know what she'd do if she never found him.
Eleanor had made an appointment for that day, and it had taken every shred of self-restraint left in her not to show up three hours before the time of her appointment just in case they could see her early. She did show up in the city of Chicago three hours early, but most of those three hours was spent nervously clutching a cup of coffee at a cafe around the corner and going over everything that she knew she had to tell them multiple times, just in case she forgot something. As it turns out, the only thing she forgot was to drink the coffee in her hand while she waited, inevitably abandoned at the table when she realized what time it was and immediately ran for the cafe's exit.
She burst through the doors of Blue Rose Investigations with an anxious flurry, cheeks flushed from the cold and the strands of her hair that weren't pulled back flying all over the place as she immediately made a beeline for the receptionist's desk. A brunette with a vague, far off look sat there, her hand poised over the phone like she was just waiting for it to ring. "Hi, I'm Eleanor Taft, I have an appoint-"
The brunette's gaze lifted from wherever it was that the other woman couldn't see to Eleanor's more frazzled one, and without waiting for Eleanor to finish, she lifted the phone she'd already been holding and pressed a single button before speaking into it. "Hey boss, your one o'clock is here." The receptionist hung up again and looked back at Eleanor, her expression hard to read except for the open curiosity. "He'll be right out, if you want to take a seat over there while you wait, sweetie." Eleanor sat down almost robotically on the edge of a nearby chair because she didn't know what else to do, and she thought she was going to burst out of her own skin if the person she was supposed to be meeting with didn't materialize on her side of the reception area in the next three seconds.