Lone Departure

It felt wrong to be out there again without her.

Frankie’s determination revealed itself to be hollow as soon as she noticed she wasn’t actually making any steps to find her sister. Once she got outside, she’d ran around the park, looking everywhere as if Katie would just be chilling on some ride or something- letting her thoughts carry her away. Really, it was an exercise in futility that let her blow off some steam.

Her same childish anxiety overtook her the second she calmed down to sit alone on a bench, watching people walk by. At least it kept her from crying. When she finally realized what she was doing, she really wanted to.

She didn’t have any plans on how she’d find Katie. The truth was, with everything going on around her, with how afraid she was and how horribly uncomfortable her existence had become-

She kinda just wanted to run away, herself.

Pushing the thoughts down to the very soles of her feet, the woman stood. No. Even if it was an excuse before, she wasn’t about to let herself waste more time. She would find her sister, and then… and then everything would be okay. Maybe.

She took one look back at the apartment complexes in the distance, and knew she was making the wrong choice.

Swallowing the guilt, she racked her brain, trying as hard as she could to forget about her lover and her family. She focused herself on her one mission, starting with- a hypothesis.

Where did she go?

Where would she have gone without me?

How far could she have gone?

She thought back to their conversations on that horrible night they’d first run away on. There were so many places in this world Katie still had left to visit. She could at least cross off the ones they’d seen together- surely she wouldn’t be on a bus to Venge City or Kidneyland- but that was a drop in the ocean out of everywhere else she could’ve ran to. So where…

Against her better judgment, Frankie hid behind an attraction and began to further grapple with the memories of one of her most difficult days.

“That’s right, I want to go back. We’re going back.”

“I like them… I like them.”

“It’s… natural, to be this way about this kind of thing.”

Everything she’d said that trip had been hard to hear. Tearing up again just thinking about it, Frankie stopped acting like she didn’t know where her sister was coming from. She as scared as she was, after all. She didn’t want the world to end. If left alone for long enough, she’d turn to desperate means. The question was… what kind of desperate means would Katie turn to?

Something about it already started to click in her head, but she wanted to ignore it too before the repressed parts of that night came slipping out from under her memories.

“There’s something about it that calms the mind. To see, with your own eyes, that the world is just as hostile as you think it is.”

“She fascinates me, more than anything.”

“I think she wanted to make everybody else realize what she already had.”

Frankie swallowed saliva.

That thought she just had… that was just… a that was just some stupid idea, right?

No. Not there. She didn’t want to know what that place was like.

Frankie finally found how idiotic she was being- no, how terrified she’d been. She knew what she could’ve been doing this whole time. Katie had a new phone. And the family had made damn sure they’d be able to track it. If Frankie had truly desired to know where she was, she could’ve found that answer in seconds with a few strokes of her thumbs.

She just didn’t want to.

This whole time, she hadn’t really wanted to know. She hadn’t really felt like it. She really did just want to run away.

At this point, she knew where Katie was, but if only to atone for her sins, she checked the tracker anyway.

Illuminating her shadowed face, the answer appeared to her on the blue luminescent screen. The distance she’d covered didn’t make sense. She must have spent their money on a plane ticket. But learning of how much harder the journey would be for her as opposed to her sister wasn’t what scared her.

She read the page up and down to make sure she wasn’t just hallucinating.

Katie Pop was already in Wirestone Park, Idaho- former home of the X Dreadnought.