Find What's Been Lost

Maybe he'd made a mistake in asking what he had.

All at once, there was a lot of information being given to him. He wasn't sure how he was supposed to react but if he had to describe what his reaction was, it would be that he was dumbfounded at Adrienne's words. She'd started off with telling him that they'd been in the same year at Hogwarts, that they'd had classes together and that was all things that were supposed to be normal. But then, she told him something that completely threw him for a loop.

They had been.. married? That was, unexpected to say the least. In less than an hour he'd gone from thinking he might not have even a single person who'd cared about him to finding out that he'd had a wife at one point. He stared at her, eyes widening, mouth opening but no words being formed to be able to respond to her. What was he even supposed to say to that? Instead, he just let her continue while he gathered himself and his thoughts about the entire thing.

"How could.." he started but ended up trailing off, unable to finish his sentence.

He disappeared, but then he came back.. That was impossible, Kaiden had been gone for over a year. At least he thought so, he'd been in Greece that entire time, and he was sure as hell that he hadn't been there for a short amount of time. Something was wrong there, and then she said it. "That had to have been it." he was finally able to form a sentence. "I don't know what happened during that entire time, but all I know is that that was not me. Someone had to have taken my spot because I have not been here for a long time."

He didn't know what was going on, why there was another him, but he figured that whoever had taken his place this entire time had planned to get rid of Adrienne if what she was saying was true. He really wanted to believe what she was telling him, but it all sounded so far-fetched to him. Surely he would have at least remembered that there was a marriage law, that they had been married.. But he couldn't trust himself either, he'd forgotten who he was, someone who was apparently very important to a specific family. Though, clearly not that important if they found someone to take his place with such ease.

"I need to talk to them." he suddenly blurted out. "I have to find out what the hell happened. Why no one looked for me, why there's apparently another me. I have to know. Can you.. help me with that? At least help me get there?" he asked, feeling his eyes sting as though tears were threatening to appear.

He looked down at his feet for a moment, trying to calm himself. "I have to ask you something though," he said softly, "Were you happy before all that? With me, I mean." He didn't look up, afraid to make eye contact with her as he waited for her response.

Adrienne nearly reared back at his request. The last thing she wanted was to go near them again after the hell they had put her through when she tried to get away. In one sense, they wanted her gone because she wasn't a pureblood. But in another, it was by law that they had been married, so what could they do? The annulment was the best and apparently the only option. Still, she could see how confused he looked. And, indeed, it was quite a story to take in, she realized.

Perhaps she would need to pull out old copies of the Prophet. Prove it to him, at least to the extent that she was able.

Instead of reacting visibly, she just stared at him, grateful when he kept talking. That is, until the question was asked and her stomach turned. And then her eyes stung like they were burning.

"I was," she assured him, her voice broken. "Until you left. I don't- I don't understand why you left. I thought... I thought you'd really come to love me, and then you disappeared and then it was like you couldn't bear to look at me. Or whoever they were couldn't. They were up to- to all manner of things with a... friend of mine," she tried to find an appropriate word for what she and Shylock were. "None of it made sense."

Adrienne dashed away a tear brought on by confusion and frustration and a resentment she had tried to ignore for over a year. "Your leaving ruined everything."

A wave of relief rushed over him as she assured him that she had, in fact, been happy with him before that entire mess happened. That relief was quickly replaced though and what it was replaced with was far from what he'd wanted it to be. Almost as quickly as the relief had hit him, regret and remorse hit him. He'd left her alone, without protection, with his seemingly unwelcoming family and he felt his chest tighten at the thought of what she must have gone through with them without him there.

But he'd had no control over what had happened to him. He didn't even remember why he would have had to leave in the first place that would have gotten him stuck in Greece in the first place. He wondered if it had been planned, from what he'd already heard about his so-called family, he felt like it was something they would do. But would his parents really put their own son in danger to get rid of someone else who they thought was intruding in their family? He nearly shuddered at the thought of what they might be capable of to accomplish their goals.

His hand twitched as he listened to her speak. Kaiden wanted to go up to her, he wasn't sure why, to wrap his arms around her, embrace her and tell her he was sorry. He knew no amount of apologizing could possibly make up for what had happened, for him leaving without warning, for whoever had come back to her treating her as badly as they seemed to have treated her.

He held his arm back, desperately fighting the urge to reach out to her. "I'm sorry.." he almost whispered, not knowing what else to do. His eyes had returned to her face and the moment he saw her hand move to brush a tear away, he broke. He couldn't help himself and before he knew it, he'd quickly closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around her. "I'm so sorry, Addie. I'm sorry you had to go through all of that, I'm sorry I left you alone." He felt as though they were empty apologies as he had no memories of what had happened, but the feelings were real.

He was sure of that. He was sorry, and all the emotions rushing through him made him hug her tighter as he whispered, "I'm sorry.." Once more, tears finally breaking free and beginning to roll down his face.

Adrienne knew how to handle Kaiden when he was angry. It was what she had done when they first met. He'd fought against her for far too long before caving and letting her help. And it had been a long time since she'd really focused on helping someone else, even though that used to be her one real goal. How far she had fallen since graduation.

In truth, it explained her problems with Selwyn to some extent. In trying to be helpful, she'd made things worse, and made her wonder if, perhaps, she wasn't really destined to be helpful as she'd always wanted. Perhaps there was something a bit broken in her after everything, and that just wasn't going to work the way she'd imagined.

He approached and she let him try to comfort her for a second, but then she shied away, removing herself from his hold even as he began to cry as well. And she couldn't blame or judge him for that, given what he claimed had happened and how little he could remember.

"It's fine," she claimed, straightening up. "I wish you would have said something before, but... it's much too late for that now."

She shook her head but remembered what it was that he'd wanted. He wanted to go home. So she cleared her throat, deciding to be brave. Deciding to help. "I can get you home, though, if you want."

"How was I supposed to say anything if I wasn't even here?" he asked softly, letting go of Addie and looking at the floor.

He didn't think he could make things better even though he wanted to try so badly. Everything that was going on right now, was hard for Kaiden to take in completely. He wasn't sure he could believe everything that he was being told, but Adrienne didn't seem like she was lying. Especially not about the things that involved her. She seemed especially hurt about what his family seemed to have done to her, which was why he was more inclined to believe everything she was saying.

"I want to make things right, with you. I know you think it's too late, but you have to give me a chance to defend myself about what happened. If you don't completely believe that I wasn't here when all of that happened, I can prove it to you. I can talk to the woman who took me in while I was in Greece." At this point he was just rambling, he wanted to fix everything, he wanted there to be no doubt in Addie's mind that he had been gone and that he had nothing to do with what his family had done.

He curled his hands into fists, looking at her with now slightly puffy eyes from his crying. "Will you stay there with me? I want you to be there, to help me figure out what's true and what's not. I want to be certain of what they're saying, they don't seem like they'd just flat out tell me the truth. Like they'd try to fill my head with lies." He swallowed hard, hoping her answer would be the one he wanted to hear.

Kaiden didn't know if he could handle facing his family alone. Especially not knowing if they were going to tell hi the truth about what happened. Or if they were even going to be happy about seeing him. He just wanted to know why they'd made the decisions they had, why he'd been left for dead, apparently.

"No, I meant before!" She burst, shaking her head. She didn't understand where he was coming from. "Kaiden, you don't remember me. How can you try and make things right, like they used to be? I thought you loved me. And then you disappear without warning and then when you come back you're dreadfully scary and your parents didn't help and..."

She trailed off, shrugging and probably looking quite like a fish as she tried to find something else worth saying.

His next question baffled her. "Are you mad? No, of course not. Your family- it's so confusing to me that you would ask that. They will absolutely try to convince you of things that aren't true. Are you... are you staying at the Leaky right now? I'm sort of living with someone else so I can't offer to have you there but I can meet you somewhere if you want me to."

Adrienne crossed back towards him, reaching out and taking hold of his upper arms. "I'm never going back to that house. You can't make me, Kaiden. But if I can help you, I will."

At this point Kaiden didn't know what he was supposed to say or how he was supposed to feel. About anything. His thoughts were all over the place and so were his emotions. He was scared, angry, sad. He felt like any and all negative emotions he could be having were there right now and he had absolutely no idea how to handle the massive jumbled up amount of emotions going through him.

It was hard to learn everything he had learned while talking to Adrienne, but he felt like there was something more there that was making the emotions so much harder on him than they should have been. He knew it couldn't be positive but he also knew that it wasn't exactly negative. Maybe it was just confusion.

His head was starting to hurt.

Kaiden looked at Adrienne and shook his head, "No, I'm staying with the person who brought me here. She said she had a house somewhere around here, and showed me how to get there." he told her. Was it a bad thing that he felt a sharp pain in his chest when she said that she was living with someone else? Because he did and he didn't know what to do about it besides not mention it as his eyes lowered to the floor and he stared at his shoes for a moment to compose himself. Kaiden wanted to move away from her touch when she reached out to grab his arms, but he couldn't bring himself to actually do so.

He simply stood there, feeling her hands' warmth on his arms, still not wanting to lift his gaze to meet hers. He was terrified of what could happen when he went to meet with his family, and he wanted someone there with him, but the only person who would be able to help him was refusing to. He had to find a way to gather the courage to confront them, somehow. "Fine," he started. "You don't have to. I just.." he trailed off for a bit, finally bringing himself to look at her.

"I want to be able to remember. Everything. I want to be able to go back to how things were before my dad made me leave on that stupid business trip." he muttered, his eyes suddenly going wide. He hadn't known that before. When he found himself in Greece he had no idea why or how he'd ended up there.

He remembered something. He remembered that.

Adrienne nodded at his correction, unsure what else to do. In truth, the whole thing was impossibly hard to believe. What she needed, perhaps, was time. Time to consider whether the old Kaiden was one who deserved to be believed, whether this new one matched up with him, and what on earth that meant about the Kaiden in between.

He sounded so genuine, she realized, once he really looked at her and let himself explain what he wanted. The list didn't include her, but she supposed that was fair enough after everything she had said so far and how she had reacted. She did tense, however, when he mentioned the business trip. She remembered talk of that, but hadn't been gifted the full explanation. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she waited to see if he would say anything else.

For a few moments, she wished that they had been granted the foresight to know that something like this would happen. Or that she had taken his family more seriously and had come up with a way to know, for sure, that this was the same person she had married - however willingly or not. She wished they had come up with a signal like in the movies or books she had read in the past, but they hadn't.

And he wasn't saying anything else, probably waiting for her to step in. So she sighed, relaxing her hold on his arms and instead dropping one hand and letting the other rub his shoulder rather awkwardly.

"Look, it's like I said. I want to help. Just... not there. I can't. And I- I'll need a few days to really wrap my head around everything if I'm honest. I'll- I'll send you an owl, telling you where to meet me and we can talk about it. Figure out what you want to say to them. Does that work?"

He'd hesitated. Once he'd mentioned the trip his father had made him take, he'd begun to hesitate and hadn't been able to get more words to flow from his lips. He cursed himself silently, wishing the realization hadn't caught him as off guard as it had. He felt as though Adrienne thought he was lying, because of a single thought, though it had been one he hadn't been able to control. He'd said it without thinking about it and he wasn't sure what else he was supposed to do now.

The ex-Slytherin thought it was going to unravel everything he had just worked so hard to do. He thought he'd at least somewhat gained her trust, and now he felt like that was going to disappear if she said anything about what he'd just said. He was so stupid sometimes, and it was hard to believe he'd ever been a Slytherin with the way he was now.

"I.." He suddenly interrupted, ready to defend himself in case she mentioned the trip, but trailed off as she continued. Was she not going to mention it? Kaiden felt his body relax a bit as she continued speaking, though what she said wasn't exactly what he'd wanted to hear.

At least she was willing to help him, though.

Kaiden nodded, resigning himself to the thought of having to face his family alone because she didn't want to be near them. Though he couldn't really blame her, they did seem to have done some terrible things to her. "T- That's fine, I guess." He said. "I'm sorry, for being pushy about coming with me. I should've thought about how you felt." He admitted that apologizing wasn't his favorite thing, but it was necessary because he felt like he'd come across as an arse for trying to force her. For some reason, he really didn't want her to be mad at him for any reason. It was a feeling he couldn't explain, just like the pain he'd felt when she'd mentioned living with someone. It was odd but there was nothing he could really do about it.

"I.. Guess I should go now, huh?" He looked off to the side, suddenly feeling awkward. "I think I've taken enough of your time.. I didn't mean to, and I certainly didn't mean to.. drop, all of this on you." The more he spoke now, the more awkward he felt and he decided that he should just stay quiet for now.

"I don't think you understood," Adrienne said, her tone more gentle now. She wrapped her arms around her middle as she went on. "I meant that I would do with you if you met them somewhere else. I don't know that they would be willing, but as long as it's anywhere else, I will... I'll go."

She was probably going to regret that. And she didn't imagine that Selwyn - or Shylock, for that matter - would particularly appreciate her efforts. Or maybe they wouldn't care. Either way, it was too late now because she had agreed in a way.

"If I send you an owl, will it reach you?" She asked, realizing that she either needed to give him the information now or somehow find him again later.

Still, it struck her that there was something she should have said. Even if it had been implied in the way she talked about him as he was before, she had yet to get the words out. "Um.. Kai? ...I've missed you. The you from school. I'm not saying that things will be the same, but I do hope that you still are." If you're telling the truth, that is.

She wanted to qualify it, to say those words aloud. But if nothing else, she needed him to believe her until she could talk to Selwyn about it. Surely he would have a better idea of what was happening? He usually did.