You tell me all the bad things I didn’t know about myself ‘Cause you’re on to me, you’re on to me, I know Well maybe I’m lost ‘Cause you’re not looking Well at least I’m looking
On that night, Cassandra crashed through the doors of Goth manor without even trying to be quiet. Why should she? So someone could try to stop her - again? The only reason they had succeeded in stopping her before was because stupidly, she had been holding out some kind of hope for the truth. If not from her family, well… then from someone who worked with her family.
They didn’t have to tell her the truth about the “Elixir.” If they would tell her the truth about her mother’s disappearance, she would stop like they wanted her to. She would go back to being a good girl, a good student, a good catch as the heiress of the Goth fortune, like they wanted her to. And she would stop looking into all of this. She would stop digging, before she hit one of their deeply buried secrets. Even if her father told her, honestly, that he didn’t know what had happened to Bella, she would stop. She would believe him, and she would stop.
Instead, he hadn’t talked about it. And the name ‘Bella Goth’ was like a curse among the walls of Goth manor, never uttered, not if you didn’t want trouble.
So maybe the elixir didn’t have anything to do with her mother’s disappearance. There was only one way to find out, she had decided, and that thought kept repeating over and over in her head on her way to the manor, on her way inside it, and as she crossed the room to the bar. Already, she had the small, dark vial clutched in one hand. The elixir was all she had. Her only lead.
So far, she had listened. So far, she had stopped when people told her stop. At least, she had pretended to. She saw the same line before her that they did. And it wasn’t like Cassandra wanted to cross it. It wasn’t like that at all.
It’s just that, sometimes, no one will tell you the truth. Sometimes, you don’t have a choice, or other means.
And sometimes, the search for your missing mother has been a long, lonely enough road that maybe experimenting with an elixir wasn’t such an unattractive, dangerous idea anymore.
That’s how these things work. One day you come home from school and that thing you’ve been surviving - suddenly you can’t take it anymore.
Cassandra had known better than to ask her father about it directly. Still, all of her sneaking around and investigative work had led her nowhere, but to locked doors and secret meetings that she couldn’t get into, even if she’d wanted to. For the daughter of a man whose named is so closely tied to a secret “elixir,” she sure couldn’t get her hands on the thing. She’d had to buy her own sample - and it hadn’t been cheap - from a man in a hood in the downtown district.
It was time to stop doing things so by-the-book, she decided as she uncapped the little vial. A green glow peaked out of the narrow mouth. Cassandra inhaled a small breath of surprise. A trill of fear went through her heart. She knew she didn’t know anything about this stuff. Didn’t even know what it could do. But, no. It was time, she told herself curtly and grabbed a clean glass from underneath her father’s bar. She grabbed a bottle of nectar, too, and poured an inch into the bottom of the cup, to help the elixir go down easier.
If no one would answer her questions for her, then she would get the answers herself.
The answers - she’d had them tucked inside her lace-up boot for the last two weeks. She’d just been too afraid to really go after them before. But not anymore. She downed that first bit of nectar just to make sure there really was no room left for fear; then she poured another two fingers.
“What are you doing?” came a male voice from behind her.
Cassandra jumped, thinking, for a split-second, that she really had finally gone crazy and she was starting to hear her own doubts. Gripping the glass in one hand and the elixir in the other, she looked back over her shoulder, body rigid.
“I live here?” she pointed out in an exaggerated tone, keeping her back to Don Lothario. “If you’re going to be my father’s lackey, you’ll have to do better than that.”
Don stiffened at the term, but tried not to let it show in his expression.
“Your father is looking for you,” he announced.
“No, he’s not.” Cassandra drained that bit of nectar, too; then poured herself a third glass. “He just wants you to keep me out of the way.”
“That’s not—“”
Don’s voice stopped short as he spotted what was in her hand.
“Hey, come on. This isn’t the answer,” he started, but she had heard it all before. In fact, she had listened to it. All their advice. All their condolences. All their warnings - to stay away, to mind her own business, to mourn the mother that was already gone… from Don, from her father, and twice weekly from her therapist.
Nothing she wanted, nothing she thought of, was ever the ‘answer,’ was it? But that was because there was no answer. No way to feel better about what happened. Not unless she could find her mother. Not unless she could make all of this go away by getting her back.
Of course, everyone told her that that wasn’t the answer, either. That the odds of them finding her, after so much time had passed - they diminished everyday. Which was why, every day, Cassandra only tried harder. Which was why she had to do this. Right now, she decided, and dumped the vial into the cup and swirled it around.
The green glow spread, mixing with the nectar and emanating from the glass in her hand.
“Woah,” she whispered.
“Listen to me,” Don ordered. “You don’t want to do this.”
If she wasn’t so sure he would try to stop her, she would have laughed. Of course she wanted this. For more reasons than one, though she might have been embarrassed to admit that. This whole thing had been hard on her, too. What had Don ever gone through that earned him the right to dulling reality with a little of the green stuff? She knew he’d done it before. She knew nothing he’d gone through could compare to the current state of her life. Inside, she laughed at him - at all of them - while she threw back the glass and swallowed it - all of it - before he could even get across the room to her.
As he reached her, he cursed under his breath.
She had swallowed it so fast that she hadn’t hardly even tasted it. But now that it was down, the overwhelming tinge of its taste stayed behind in her mouth and caused her to cough. She struggled to comprehend the flavor - unlike anything she’d ever had before. The only way she could think to describe it was… glowing. Like it had a life of its own, on her taste buds. Like even after she swallowed it, she could keep tasting it, all the way down, through her whole body. Like it didn’t just drop into her stomach, but rather, spread through her very veins, to every inch of her body, warm and glowing and… bright.
Cassandra hadn’t felt anything so bright in - forever, it felt like. It was almost happy. The haze and the headache - even the grief - were all suddenly lifted, like a veil. And, for a moment, she felt so free that she couldn’t even remember why she had done this; could only feel glad that she had. Okay, so maybe not completely free - but like the cage door was at least open. Like even if she wasn’t out of it yet… she felt like she could be.
“You should sit,” Don said, grabbing her by the arm as he came up beside her.
Her attention jumped to him with a wide-eyed suddenness. “I’m out,” she blurted, suddenly looking panicked. “That was all that I had. I need to get more. I’m all out.”
She never wanted to feel like That again. She never wanted to stop feeling like This, either.
“Come with me,” she said suddenly and took a step towards the door, but he stopped her.
For the first time ever, it didn’t completely annoy her. Instead, she spun around, her boots slipping slightly on the waxed wood floor, and she laughed.
“How are you feeling?” Don asked, his other hand moving to the soft, fleshy spot beneath her jaw. Her heart was racing. He didn’t have to take her pulse properly to be able to tell. “I think you should sit.”
“Sit? I could fly!” she exclaimed with a grin that he had never seen on her before. “I feel amazing… I feel incredible…!” She grabbed him suddenly by the shoulders. “Do you want some? We should go get more and you should have some. Come on. I know a place.”
She moved her hand down his arm to his hand and tugged him towards the door, but he resisted, ignoring the suggestion. But a smile rose to his face. He’d never seen her this happy, for as long as he’d known her. It looked good on her. And her hand in his felt warm. Besides, what heiress didn’t, every once in a while, get herself into a situation that needed to be hidden from the rest of the world? The tabloids were filled with people, and moments, like these.
“Come on, let’s go!” she whined.
“Sorry, kid. We’re staying in,” Don said. “Your father- Hey, you good?”
His expression changed as suddenly as hers had. The grin was gone from her face. She was coughing again and grabbing at her throat. His own smile was weighed down with concern.
“You need to slow down,” he said suddenly. “You might be having an adverse reaction.”
She was still gripping his hand, suddenly tighter and more fearfully than before, as she stumbled, her knees buckling underneath her. He drew her hand to his chest, straightening her arm so he could ease her down to the floor. She sat with her back flat against the front of the bar. Suddenly, the weight of the world had come crashing down on her. The sadness. The grief. All of it, but not like before - worse than before. Much worse than before. Her fingers suddenly unraveled from his. She wanted him out of here. She wanted to run. She didn’t want to find her mother anymore, to solve anything, so much as she just wanted all of it to... stop.
“You’re alright. See? You’re gonna be fine,” Don reassured her, switching into his professional mode as he got down on the floor beside her. The local hospital had seen its fair share of people under the influence. He knew from experience, as he checked her forehead for a fever, that the elixir didn’t mix well with some. He should have seen it coming, he scolded himself as he reached past her head and pressed a bottle of water into her hand. Substances like these could worsen a person’s state, even if, at first, they felt like they were on top of the world.
He unscrewed the cap for her because her hands were shaking. She seemed so out of it, staring at something far-off, that he had to push the bottle up to her mouth for her.
“We should get you out of here,” he said, his mind already turning as he planned their escape route. He would take her to her place, where she could recover in privacy. Until then, he would just keep reporting to her father that he’d never found her; couldn’t track her down.
But as he tried to help her to her feet, she put a hand against his chest, suddenly, to stop him.
“I can see her,” she said breathlessly, her eyes fixated on the empty doorway there. Don knew that if he looked, there wouldn’t be anything there. Not really. He put one arm around her back and the other under her knees and hoisted Cassandra into his arms. Her eyes had filled with tears, and she was crying them, not able to hold back. Not able to keep it in any longer. Maybe it was the elixir. But then again, maybe it was just life, just time, the weight of everything that had been pressing down on her.
“Wait,” Cassandra demanded as he carried her through the doorway. Her whole body tensed up in his arms. “Put me down! I’m not leaving! She just got here!”
“She’s not real,” Don tried to tell her, but through the hot, heavy wave of the effects of the elixir, even if she wasn’t screaming the word over and over again, Cassandra still wouldn’t have heard him.
“Mom!”