And as it turned out, my fears were very much justified.
Amelia waited until Zahara and I were both sitting at the table for dinner one night before she abruptly made an announcement. “I know who Ari is.”
I froze, and Zahara paused, too, before setting her fork down.
“But,” Amelia continued, “before you freak out,” she said to me, “or you decide what to do about it,” to Zahara, “I want you to hear me out.”
“Ari is Leon Galanis,” she explained, much to my dismay. I wished I could sink into the floor and disappear.
Zahara frowned. “That name sounds familiar.”
“It should, it’s been all over the news for a year. The other day I was watching a news special on it and noticed Ari’s response and was pretty sure it was him, but I looked into it first. I found everything I could on the internet, trying to figure out what is going on, and I think I have a guess. Maybe.”
Amelia pulled out her phone and then straightened up a little, like she was giving a speech. “Ari’s full name is Ariston Leonidas Galanis. He went to live with his aunt, Melia Galanis, a few years ago after his parents died. I tried finding anything on him before that, or even what happened to his parents, but there’s nothing. I’m assuming that means it’s supernatural stuff and their deaths probably weren’t normal? Anyway, right after he moved in with his aunt, there was an interview with her from a local paper at the small town she lived in at the time.”
The article that had started the whole snowballing nightmare.
Amelia plopped a folder down on the table and pulled out a couple of pages stapled together, that fateful article printed on them, and pushed them across the table to Zahara, whose brows were furrowed slightly as she read. “The article says that Ari, at that time, was recovering from a spinal injury but was expected to make a full recovery. The article praised his aunt, who’s a nurse, for taking in an injured kid with a serious injury, especially when the aunt admitted she’d barely talked to her brother in years and never actually met Ari until she became his guardian. The article seemed normal enough, but things started to get weird after that.”
Amelia pulled some more pieces of paper and started spreading them across the table, apparently forgetting that, in theory, we were supposed to be eating right now. “The aunt started a blog talking about Ari’s progress, which was getting some notice, but then she moved here for reasons I can’t tell, and somehow she seemed to keep picking up media attention. I guess the story of a sick kid and his caring aunt made for the perfect feel-good story that would grab people’s attention? Anyway, the weird thing is, every new interview and article includes some new condition she says Ari had. Right before he disappeared, she was claiming he was paralyzed – he’d apparently been in a wheelchair for the several years he’s been with her – plus a bunch of other things that I didn’t entirely understand even though I tried to look into them. But it’s like he just kept getting new diagnoses somehow, when originally…originally he was supposed to be getting better, right? And all these new conditions didn’t seem to have any relation to the original injury. He didn’t appear too much in the interviews or TV appearances his aunt made, but he didn’t look too good when he did.” Amelia frowned at nothing in particular. She was deliberately avoiding looking directly at me this entire time, while I was just frozen, listening to her repeat the story of my sad, miserable little life.
“But that’s the thing that bothered me. She’s claiming – still claiming – that Ari can’t walk and is really sick, right? Yet you told me that if shifters have a condition in human form, it’ll carry over to shifted form. So if Ari really couldn’t walk, then he shouldn’t be able to walk in cat form. But he can, and he has no problem doing so. Not to mention, he’s been healthy the entire time he’s been with us. When I first took him to the vet, he said Ari was healthy, though maybe a little skinny, which I just chalked up to living on the streets. So I think Ari ran away because she was lying about all of that. Maybe. I can’t really explain the part about him actually looking sick during some of the interviews, or why no one noticed if she was lying, but there’s a few things that bear out that theory. First, there’s some footage from the night he ran away, you can literally see him walking just fine. He also left a note on some kind of online school bulletin board saying he was running away to escape his aunt, though it was taken down pretty quickly. There’s some blogs speculating that she isn’t the kind person she appears to be, and they managed to get a screenshot of what he said. It doesn’t appear to be photoshopped, although I suppose it’s possible.”
Amelia was clearly doing her best to convince lawyer Zahara, not girlfriend Zahara, and was trying to bring all her best evidence, because she was carefully giving Zahara each printout as she went on. “The blog also had a link to a police report that they got through some kind of records request process, and just to make sure they weren’t lying, I went I requested the record, too.” Amelia looked a little more anxious now. “According to the report, Ari called the police complaining that his aunt was making him sick. They showed up, listened to her explanation about all these chronic illnesses he supposedly had, and then chalked it up to a kid either not understanding or just trying to be rebellious or being mad at his aunt for some reason and closed the complaint. This was like a year or so before he disappeared. Point is, it actually lines up some with the chronology if you take a look at how these illnesses kept appearing. Plus, well, we have some evidence the blog and the police don’t have. We know Ari is a shifter and in shifted form, he’s just fine. Which kind of screams that he wasn’t that sick in human form, either. You and I both know Ari was desperate enough about not shifting back that he was willing to go feral rather than risk it. So I’m pretty sure,” her eyes flitted to me, then back to Zahara, “that the aunt is lying. And that’s why Ari ran away.”
The dining room was quiet then, except for the sound of paper as Zahara slowly flipped through all the articles and screenshots and whatever else Amelia had printed out to show her.
“Munchausen Syndrome, or Munchausen by Proxy,” Zahara mumbled. “It’s a mental disorder. A caregiver basically seeks attention by having a sick child. It’s not a common thing and can be really hard to pinpoint, because it looks like the caregiver is being an attentive, caring person doing the best they can for the child. Sometimes they’ll lie about symptoms or even induce them, and being a nurse, she’d probably have a better idea than average people about what kind of symptoms are just vague enough that even medical professionals would buy into it and presume she’s right. And she may not even realize it’s all in her head because she probably has trouble telling truth from fiction, especially when it comes to Ari. Maybe she imagines ‘what if he has this’ and obsesses over it, and next thing you know, she’s claiming he does have it. But it’s a form of abuse and can lead to its own real medical issues – caused by whatever the person is doing the child, such as starving them or giving them medications they don’t need – and can even result in death. Recognizing it is difficult and proving it could be tough.” She lifted her head from whatever she was reading and looked over at me, still frozen in front of my plate, but her eyes were soft. “I imagine you’ve been really scared these past few years, haven’t you? And you tried to ask for help, but the police didn’t listen.”
They hadn’t been the only ones I’d gone to. All the adults in my life had failed me, every single one of them listening to my aunt over me. Just because she appeared to be this caring person didn’t mean she actually was, and having adult after adult shut me down had started to terrify me that I would genuinely get stuck being her sick doll for the rest of my life. And I really didn’t want that.
Without warning, Amelia suddenly snatched me up and folded me in a tight hug, burying her face in my fur. “I’m so sorry you lost your parents only to end up with her.” Her voice came out all muffled and I felt her tears against my fur, but I didn’t fight her. I – I kind of liked her tight hug. It made me feel warm and safe. “But you’re safe now, right?” She looked back up at Zahara, alarm clearly written all over her face. “I know it’s a national case and you might risk your job if people found out you knew, but we won’t send him back, we just can’t! We promised we wouldn’t kick him out, and we might not be able to prove the munch house thing but we know, and we know he’s really fine, so…as long as he stays as a cat, he’s fine, right?”
I looked anxiously at Zahara, too. Given that she was a lawyer, I shared Amelia’s apprehension that Zahara might feel like she had to report it when she found a runaway minor, especially now that they knew who I was and that my disappearance was a case of national interest.
Zahara set the papers down and looked at us thoughtfully. “When I was a kid, I was taken away from my parents,” she began, totally startling both me and Amelia with the change of subject. “They’d gotten into drugs and didn’t take care of me at all. Unfortunately, even supernaturals aren’t immune to the lures of things like drugs. It wasn’t pretty – they were mostly too strung out on whatever their drug of choice was to even notice I existed. I survived mostly because I could grow vegetables and fruit so I had something to eat, but eventually my home state got some attention from neighbors and teachers and I was removed for my own safety.”
She leaned back in her chair. “I didn’t take it too well. Fairies…we value our family units. Awful as my parents had been in their sheer neglect, they were still my family and I felt lost without them. I turned into a bitter, defensive, sarcastic, snarky pre-teen who would get into fights at school constantly. I wouldn’t ever throw the first punch, but I knew how to incite someone into trying to hit me and I knew how to throw a proper punch in response. I probably fed into the whole stereotype of foster kids being troubled but, well, I was.
“Then one day my foster parents sat me down. I kind of assumed they were going to tell me they were sending me off to another home because they were sick of having the school call them about me. I just figured that was normal, that eventually they’d get fed up with me. I think there was a part of me that was scared that that was what had happened to my parents – that I wasn’t good enough, so they’d turned to drugs. It made more sense to me to just wall everyone else off than risk getting hurt again.”
Amelia didn’t seem to have heard this story, either, because she was listening as raptly as I was, though she looked like she wanted to cry for past Zahara.
Zahara tilted her head to one side, her eyes focused on the past rather than on either of us. “But instead, my foster parents shocked me. They were offering me adoption papers. I’d barely said a civil word to them the entire time I’d been there and had caused them so much trouble, so the suggestion that they wanted to adopt me absolutely floored me and I had no idea what to say in response.
“My foster dad just gave me this smile and told me that he knew I needed a family unit. They were fairies, see, and that’s why they’d taken me in as a foster kid – because they wanted a fairy to be with their own kind. My foster dad told me that they knew we weren’t exactly on the best terms, but they wanted to make sure I always had a home that I could count on. I’ll never forget – he said: ‘even if we’re not friends, we can still be family.’ They were offering to be my parents even if I never warmed up to them. That completely shook my worldview and suddenly I found myself with proper legal parents who were doing their best to actually care for me, regardless of how I acted towards them, but the realization that I barely knew them and had done nothing at all to deserve their care kind of shook me. So I completely switched gears and threw myself into being the model child. I tried to get the best grades, do all the chores around the house – honestly, anything I thought might make them happy with me. I didn’t want them to regret their decision.
“And then they sat me down again, and I was terrified this time that I’d messed up somehow, but instead they wanted me to relax. My mom, she told me that I didn’t need to try so hard, that this would always be my home no matter what. And Dad said they would be proud of me as long as I grew up happy and healthy and did what I loved. That I didn’t have to try to please them to make them love me, that they’d love me just for being me. And, well, after that, we started being a real family.
“I didn’t realize it when they adopted me, but they’re connected to some of the most influential fairies in the world – Mom’s cousin married the former fairy king, so the entire extended family is kind of permanently involved in supernatural politics, apparently – yet they didn’t bat an eye at the idea that they were adopting this kid who, at the time they adopted me, was a trouble maker and problem child. They didn’t even care about all of that or how the family might look at them when they adopted me, and the first time I met the extended family, they were kind of protective of me to make sure everyone accepted me and, well, they all did. I didn’t look like any of them and was just this average fairy from a messed up family, yet everyone was immediately welcoming and never cared about any of that.”
She dropped her eyes back to me. “The reason I told you all of that is to tell you the same thing my parents told me back when I was a kid: you have a home with us no matter what. You don’t have to be scared. I know the situation is a bit of a mess, but we will never force you to go back to your aunt or to leave us unless you want to, and even then, we’re going to be nosy enough to want to make sure you’re going to someplace safe, okay? We’re your family now, your new parents if you want us to be, and we’ll be your home for as long as you want us in your life.”
Amelia was delighted with this answer and gave Zahara a huge smile while she reached across to hold her hand, the other hand gently stroking me while Zahara, likewise, reached over to softly rub my cheek.
If I’d have been in human form, I’d have cried with relief. They knew – they knew all of it – yet they weren’t going to send me back. They even believed me without me ever saying a word, the first adults to ever do that. And they wanted me to stay with them and were offering me a permanent home that represented genuine care and love.
Why would I ever want to turn that down?
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