Circle Interrupted - Chapter 1 Excerpt
Someone asked me if I could post a small excerpt from each chapter so they could get a taste of the fic, and that sounded fun! So I plan to start posting a chapter excerpt of each one out for the next four days
The fic is a continuation of VA and Bloodlines tying together a lot of the dropped plots from both - mostly Cannon Compliant.
Rated T - Heavy Situations, Mental Health & PTSD, Violence, & hurt/comfort (see tags on fic)
Sydney & Adrian Alternating POV
Canon Divergent Fix It Fic post Silver Shadows - Sydney/Adrian, Jill/Eddie, Trey/Angeline, incidental Lissa/Christian, incidental Rose/Dimitri
Circle Interrupted Chapter 1 Link
Adrian’s eyes met mine and I could see the fear inside me, of being separated again, reflected in them.
Suddenly I realized everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to say something. But the thing was, I didn’t know what to say.
On the one hand, there was Jill. Wonderful, bright, passionate Jill, who had been spirited away in the middle of the night. Jill, who had been jostled around, fulfilling the needs of others since the world learned the truth, that she was not just another common Moroi girl but one of the last in an ancient line of royal blood. Used to gain her sister a throne, killed to remove her family from power, hidden away to maintain peace, and now stolen away for sinister reasons. But it went deeper than that. I didn’t learn to love a princess, I loved my friend: passionate about fashion-club, who dated humans, moroi and dhampirs alike, who was terrible at mini-golf and kept my secrets. On the other hand, it really would mean leaving Adrian behind, with a chance I would really never see him again if I was caught.
But… as I counted the flecks of brown in Adrian’s green eyes, and the desperation with which he needed me, I knew that those green eyes were also Jill's, in more ways than one. She was looking out at me too, from the depths of his gaze, suffocating in the dark, trapped in a room with a dirt floor. She must be watching the TV in her head, the only outlet from the dark and the dust. Were they keeping her all alone? Were they clothing her? Feeding her? Or purging her of all her strength. I caught my breath, holding Adrian’s gaze and his hand. I willed my face to smile.
“Do you remember the night we got here?” I asked quietly, ignoring the others and talking directly to him.
“I’d never forget our wedding night.”
“What about the one before that?” I asked.
It was the day I’d escaped from re-education after 3 months of psychological and physical torture. Once the high of escape ebbed away and night settled in, the darkness had closed in on me. Adrian had held me, uncomplaining, as I cried myself to sleep. We hadn’t talked about why I’d needed the hotel lights on, though Adrian had bought one of those aurora machines for our apartment and set it up the day we moved in. We hadn’t talked about the other things either - the way my skin cleaved at my rib cage, or why I refused to eat certain foods that I’d once loved. He’d brought it up, once or twice. I was the one to cut the conversation off. But he had to know.
“If this can prevent Jill from any of that…” I knew I was being vague. The eyes of my friends bore into me. I willed Adrian to understand.
“I could help…” he said, finally, his voice pleading.
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