Okay, I have an excuse for not updating. Here it is- I have actually written about four chapters over the last couple of weeks, but they all sucked. I'm talking about awful, horrible, completely dreadful work here; I bet that Twilight was even more well-written than the stuff I have written (well, probably not, but you never know).

So , yeah. The new (and MUCH improved) chapter four.

Disclaimer- I get it, I don't own it. Now, on with the story!

Chapter Four

Zachary

I've woken up to a lot of stuff over the years- gunshots, fistfights, missiles... You name it, it has probably happened to me.

Still, having an angry Italian man scream obscenities in my face at four in the morning is a new one for me.

"Scendere del mio piano cazzo ti stronzo. La mia squadra e ho bisogno di iniziare il nostro lavoro cazzo sulla colazione cazzo!"

If you don't know Italian, you shouldn't look that up.

I opened my eyes, the lights instantly burning them. It took me a second for me to realize where I was, but when it did, it felt like a ton on bricks was being dumped on me. The whole night came back to me in a flood of memories and moments- finding out about her leaving, packing a bag, following her...

I decided that I should have just ignored the angry Italian man and just kept sleeping. It would have made my life a whole hell of a lot easier, at least for a few minuets.

I sat up, my head pounding. Cammie may not have knocked me out, but it sure felt like she did.

"Mr. Goode!"

When he said my last name (or, at least, my mother's last name) I looked up at the guy. His face was red and fleshy, and he was all sweaty and smelled like cigars. This was the guy who made the best waffles I'd ever eaten? He had seriously worked at the White House?

Man. They must have had pretty shitty standards or something.

"Sorry about passing out on your floor here, Luigi. I kind of have problems with this kind of stuff." I made a drinking motion with my hand, which, truthfully, wouldn't really explain why I was passed out on his floor (or why I would use that kind of excuse to get out of a hairy situation when I was already on thin ice with that school) but I didn't really care.

He looked at me like I was crazy, which I don't blame him for. "My name is NOT Luigi!" He said, switching to English. "It's Michael! And furthermore, if you do not get off of my floor right now, I'm going to..."

He switched back to Italian again and continued to say things that would make the ears of small children bleed. I stood up and felt like an old man, I was so sore.

"Chill, Luigi. I'm going."

I patted him on the shoulder, throwing him a smirk for good measure, and bent down to pick up my duffel bag. It felt lighter than the night before, which wasn't a surprise. The jacket that I had given to Cam was leather, so it was fairly heavy.

Luigi kept yelling at me as I walked through the huge kitchen, which, in the light of day, was much less creepy looking, but I ignored him. I walked through doorways and hallways, not really caring about whether or not I was seen, making my way through the Grand Hall and up the Grand Staircase (I guess having government money and connections makes everything suddenly Grand and worthy of extra capitalization), past the Grand Suites full of Grand Future Spies and to my Not-so-Grand temporary room, which used to be a janitor closet.

I opened the door to said crappy room, cringing as the door squeaked in protest. The room was dark and, despite the fact that the staff had thoroughly cleaned it out, still smelled of cleaning supplies. I tripped about ten times as I made my way to my bed, which was just about as squeaky as the door and the floorboards, but I didn't really care.

I didn't really care about much of anything by then, because the only thing I cared about was on her way to God-knows-where, making her way in the big, bad world.

Without me.

I know I sounded like a pansy, but I didn't really care about that, either.

I closed my eyes, my head still pounding, and fell asleep thinking only about her, something that I could never really stop doing no matter how hard I tried.

ooo

When I woke up three hours later, I expected sirens. Dramatic lights, like the night of the dance the year before. Guards and SWAT team members banging down my door, bulletproof vests on, guns loaded and at the ready. Screaming and multiple wounds from her roommates, expulsion from the school I don't even officially go to, and a lifetime of torture and a cozy little CIA cell in the middle of Siberia.

But I didn't get any of that. Instead, just... Silence.

I did what I had been doing for the past week- woke up, went for a run in the woods, and got dressed, trying not to hate my life or myself the entire time. I went to the classes that I was forced to attend, looking for Cammie's roommates the whole time but not seeing a single one. I thought and ruled out many options, some of which included food poisoning and deadly diseases, but the most likely one was this- extra-strength Napotine patches. At all of the meals, all of which were ones that I spent alone, I saw Mrs. Morgan looking around for them, but she didn't ask me- or anyone else- about them. Maybe she thought that there was nothing to worry about- after all, no alarms had gone off, no warnings or notifications from the security department or from Cammie's roommates. Truthfully though, she was doing exactly what I was- pretending that nothing was wrong, convincing herself that there was nothing wrong, just so it would seem like there was really nothing wrong.

Still, I knew the truth, a truth that haunted me that entire day- that she was gone, and probably would be forever.

ooo

When I was a kid, there weren't many people I looked up to. I never knew my dad- I had never met him, never heard of him from my mother, never even knew his name- and my mother was hardly a model of good and right behavior, for ovbious reasons. The other adults in the Circle were pretty much carbon-copies of my mother, only less smart, and a little bit less evil. I had an older sister, Emma, but it's hard to look up to girls when you're a kid. They always worry about stupid things, like makeup and clothes and boys. Granted, she only cared about a fraction of that stuff, compared to other girls I had met in my seventeen years, but she still wasn't what I was looking for in a role model.

Then Joe Solomon joined my mother's section of the Circle when I was eight.

I had somehow known from the start that he wasn't all bad, not like the other men in Circle. He was a good guy, I knew that from the start.

He didn't look down on me or Emma, didn't treat us like dirt like everyone else did, and actually spent time with us. He taught us other languages (he taught Emma Russian, a bit of Greek, and Farsi, while he taught me the 'easy stuff', like German and French) and simple math skills, things kids years younger than us already knew how to do, since they were in school and we weren't (my mother, whose name is Minna, just for future reference, thought that public school was useless in the life of a 'spy'). He gave us the basics on espionage, things that I used every day at Blackthorne, and probably will use for the rest of my life. He played with us (cowboys and Indians with me, Barbies with Emma, even though it pained him greatly, you could tell) and I knew that he loved us, even though he couldn't say so.

He was the father Emma and I have never had, the kind of guy that makes it so entirely easy to look up to, it's slightly ridiculous.

He left our section of the Circle (the Circle of Cavan is made up of sections of spies, and Minna, my mother, ran one of them, all by herself) when I was fourteen. I will say that his leaving made both Emma and I sad, heartbroken, almost. Right after he left, Emma did too. But, unlike with Emma, I had no idea where Joe Solomon was going (Emma, despite our mother's murderous protests, joined the CIA). I saw him years later, though, when I went on a little mission in D.C. He was different, I could tell- he wasn't as playful, or as nice, as he had been when I was a kid. Still, he was Joe Solomon, my sort-of-dad.

Because of this, I knew that I should have visited him in the infirmary earlier than that day. I should have been there every day, talking to him, telling him everything that I was thinking, like I used to. I should have been there to tell him that it will be okay, even if he can't hear me, and to just ask him to wake up.

But I'm a coward, in case you haven't already figured out, and I will say that I was scared to see nothing but a shell of a man in the place of Joe Solomon.

Still, I knew that it was time. So I made my way through the labyrinth of the Gallagher Academy, passing through halls and going through elevators, talking to mechanical voices and telling guards my reasons for going to the infirmary. Finally, after what felt like an hour of going through security, I got to the infirmary.

The espionage-world-renowned Gallagher Academy infirmary is as you would expect it to be- sterile and shiny as hell, everything reflecting back at you like a freaky hospital-themed house of mirrors. There were a few doctors and nurses walking around, drinking coffee (even though it was four in the afternoon) and talking in every language imaginable. All those people, just for one patient.

They waved at me, big smiles on their faces, like seeing past patients (or a new person) in that place was the joy of their lives. I smiled back and waved a little, but it felt forced. Everything did, by then.

Mr. Solomon's room, when I got there, was cold, almost freezing. It was as clean and sterile as the rest of the hospital, a single bed and two chairs in the middle of the white, open space. Nothing about it was that surprising, except for the fact that I wasn't the only one with the idea to visit Joe Solomon.

She looked so much like Cammie that I almost forgot the night before. She was sitting in one of the chairs, face down on the bed, dark hair splayed around her as she held Joe's hand and cried. I approached carefully, wondering if my exhausted mind was hallucinating- from the back, they looked exactly the same. Same hair, same height, same everything.

Then she looked up, and reality have me a sucker punch in the gut.

"Oh, Mrs. Morgan... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..."

Professional demeanor gone, she sat up and wiped the tears away. "Don't apologize, Zachary. You actually have more of a right to be here than I do."

The comment puzzled me, but I decided to look past it. I sat in the chair on the other side of the bed, my steps quiet but seeming to be amplified in the space.

We both sat there, looking at the broken man in the bed. I hadn't seen him in about a week and a half, but he didn't look much better than he did the day I dragged him out of the caves, bleeding and burnt and screaming. I closed my eyes, erasing the memory, and just tried to take in the aliveness of my friend.

They had taken off his bandages, and it was truly a gruesome sight. He was scarred and burnt and bruised, his face bearing the resemblance of roadkill. I swallowed, trying not to let it get to me too badly.

After a minute of halfway awkward silence, I asked the million-dollar-question. "So, how's he doing?"

"Well, he's definitely not improving, but he's not getting any worse, they say. Normally, this would be a time to be worried about brain damage, but his eyes have been moving around a little, which is a very, very good sign." She sighed deeply, running a hand through her hair, a motion that was very much like Cammie. "All we can do now is... Hope."

That was dangerous enough, as it is. Hope is too much sometimes.

I sat there for a while, thinking about Cammie's question on the rooftop that day- what if he never wakes up? What then?

I sighed deeply, sadness sinking into my heart.

"What if he never wakes up?"

She looked up at me, her expression a bit surprised, as if she had never considered the idea. "I don't know."

We sat there for a while longer, not saying anything more. I could have said something about Cammie, hinted at her being gone, but I didn't. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I just couldn't bring up anything else that was sad in that room, which was depressing enough, and I couldn't do that to Mrs. Morgan, not while she was in that state- she would find out soon enough.

She left about ten minutes later, giving his hand a squeeze and saying that she would be back later. She looked at me and gave me a ghost of a smile, then left.

The room seemed even more empty and huge, when it was just Joe and me. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on the soft bed.

"Hey Joe. How you doin'?"

He didn't answer. For ovbious reasons.

This felt so awkward, it was ridiculous.

"Okay, so... I'm going to go now." I stood up a little too quickly and walked to the end of the bed. "Get better, old man."

And that was it.

ooo

I went running again that night after dinner. Maybe it was because I just wanted to be in better shape, or maybe, most likely, I just wanted to be out of that place.

Cammie's roommates hadn't woken up that day. Not even a peep. I was sure, by then, that she had done something to make sure of that.

The night was quiet and breezy. The winds in the trees made the leaves rustle quietly. I looked up at that endless sky, at all of those billions of stars, and wondered where she was right then.

That still sucked, but whatever.

By the way, I won't load the next chappie until I get to thirty-seven reviews. Okay? Okay.

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