(Continued from 'Anonymous')It took Owen far too long to realise that he had nowhere to go and nothing to get there with. He ran like the wind but he didn't need breath any more, nothing ached, there was nothing screaming in him except his mind. He eventually reached a park and gave up trying, finding himself near a rundown gazebo and flopping onto the grass just outside it. He curled up and cried for a while, hoping the noise he made would deter anyone from coming near him because it was too big to let out out quietly and fuck them anyway, if they tried to come over to see what was wrong.
He was
allowed this anguish, damnit. He
deserved this chance to howl his pain out. Anybody who'd just discovered that their entire life was a manufactured lie would do exactly the same thing, he was sure.
Crying wasn't making it better, wasn't filling up the hole inside him, though. After a while he got up and trudged into the gazebo to sit and stare at nothing in particular in order to decide what he should do. What
could he do? Karen had somehow adopted him as a baby, after he'd been abandoned in a coin laundry of all places. He wasn't sure about Vincent's involvement, exactly, but it all
seemed a bit too convenient, because there were others who'd come before him. Three girls. What had Vincent been
thinking? Had they just been adopted babies of mothers that Vincent had wanted to get close to? Why on earth did he have all those papers in his safe, if there wasn't something a little deeper going on... like maybe what had happened with him? Could it have been something to do with vampirism? That didn't make sense, though, because Leigh
was a vampire, he'd
met her and she hadn't been fledged by Vincent... had she? Had Vincent lied? If Leigh was still in Europe, there was no way
he'd feel her in his blood. Was Vincent a perpetual liar?
It was all too confusing, his mind kept going round and round in circles until Owen couldn't even recall what any of those papers had looked like, much less what they'd said. Nothing seemed certain, beyond the fact that Karen Harper wasn't his mother and Vincent had somehow become involved in his life at a very early age. And he was holding a
bunch of highly personal documents to the same effect on at least three other babies. Owen had trusted them
both and he was incredibly hurt by the fact that they'd kept these secrets from him. He'd never know who his true parents were now, yet curiosity burned in him anyway - they'd obviously been less-than upstanding citizens, to have brought him into the world and then abandoned him to it, in a laundry basket. How fucking degrading. Still, he wondered.
Right, so his life was in a shambles, the last thing he wanted to do was look at Vincent or his moth-... Karen and talk about his
feelings and he was absolutely destitute. He'd run out of his house without his wallet, keys, clothes, phone... fuck, he wasn't even wearing
shoes. The only things he had were a pair of boxer briefs, jeans and a navy blue polo shirt. Oh, and his ring. He glanced down at it, but could neither bear to look at it too hard nor throw it away so he just stopped looking and gazed around the park instead. Dawn was a couple of hours off but when it came, he'd die quickly out here, so he needed shelter. It briefly crossed his mind that it would be a spiteful, swift end to his dilemma if he chose to meet the sun but he'd worked hard to overcome the crippling thirst and become an almost-decent vampire in the past nearly-a-year and fuck them if he was going to give
that up.
The only thing he knew about for sure was the Oligarchy - Vincent and he had visited the headquarters not long after he was first sired, just to update records, and everything had been official and smooth. It had been a beautiful building (he thought, though he wasn't too certain about everything he'd seen when his bloodlust had gripped him the hardest) and he'd been told how they helped out supernaturals in need. Well, that was him right now. He stood up and got his bearings before jogging towards where he remembered the place was.
It took him a while to run there and as he approached he looked around a bit because it didn't look... inviting, somehow. Not like it had when he'd visited last. It didn't look
too different, but it was... he couldn't put his finger on what it was, there weren't as many lights on, or something (or any, that he could see)? Frowning, he ran his fingers through his wayward blonde curls in order to look a little more respectable and a lot less wild and walked up to the doors. They opened alright but there was a whole lot of emptiness that met him on the other side; the lobby was bereft of furniture. How strange.
"Hello?" he called loudly, padding silently across the marble on his stained bare feet.
