Author's Note: I was planning on pulling a Beyonce and just releasing this chapter without saying anything, but when you've been gone for a year and a half, I guess your audience deserves an explanation.
Firstly, thank you to the sweet reviewers! To the most recent reviewer (Guest): It's funny that you commented when you did! I have had the first two sections of this story written out for two days now. Thank you for your faithful reading! It genuinely warms my heart when someone cares for my writing. Let me promise this once and for all: This story will be finished. It might take a long time, but I will see it to completion.
While I have no excuses for any of 2016, 2017 has been so crazy so far. I've lived overseas for 3 months and am now back home and am moving overseas again in a week. During all of 2017, I've reread this story in order to fully remember where I was and where I needed to pick up again. I hope that this "go" at telling the story is the last and the one that will see me to the end!
Thanks for putting up with me being such a typical slow-writing FanFiction writer. I appreciate you all!
It's difficult to realize how much memory becomes a person. Eilonwy, with her memory gone, could be any well-tempered girl with blonde hair and fair features. What made her Eilonwy was her personality, shaped by experiences and memories that she was no longer able to recall.
It seemed the better one knew someone, the harder it was when they didn't remember you. Peter and Matthew seemed to understand her situation with as much sadness as would be reasonable. However, Wendy hurt the most. It felt as if both of her housemates and her little brother had been taken from her in one way or another.
How Taran reacted, no one understood. He acted as if nothing had changed. He talked to Eilonwy as if she was still aware that they had been in love for years and years. He joked with her like she still retained her sense of humor. He shared the events of his day with her, as if she understood why they were important.
Chris and Andy had questioned whether he was going through shock, but he experienced no other symptoms. It seemed as if he was simply coping with the situation by treating Eilonwy the same way.
Had Taran felt the need to explain himself, he would have said that Eilonwy's memories would come back eventually and that she would like to come back into a familiar state of mind with familiar faces. He knew she would be upset if she missed anything simply because of an injury that had an unfortunate side effect. He also hoped that something he did could draw her back into herself. For now, at least, his gentle friendliness seemed to put Eilonwy, who was unwonted to be so easily frightened, at ease. She slowly began to realize her situation and become aware of her lack of memories.
She instead gained new ones from the same six visitors that would visit her rooms every day… especially the one she had learned to call Taran.
But what the other five never said and what the nurses never acknowledged (probably because they didn't have to) was that Eilonwy might never regain her memories. Her old life may never return to her. She might forever only retain her eighteenth year onward. And, because of this, a new personality would be formed within her. She could fall in love with someone else. She could choose different friends. Or she could do none of this at all.
Yet Taran cherished the moments she acted the most like herself. It was almost like a light shining through the fog of her muddled past. These were the moments he had to hold on to when he would have to leave the hospital each night and head home… alone.
With good reason, Wilbur Robinson had successfully avoided Andy Davis recently. If there was one thing that made Davis more intolerable, it was the pouty face and mournful attitude he'd adopted since Alice had gone away. Usually simply not seeing Andy would be enough to avoid him. It suddenly became difficult when Andy started tracking him down.
To be honest, Wilbur hadn't thought much of Alice's disappearance. She left and Lilo came and that provided for the majority of his distraction. Before Lilo, he was just looking for a romantic relationship… he and Alice had never really been friends beyond that. He cared for her leaving as a concerned citizen, nothing more. His new focus was righting the wrong in his life and deepening what he had with Lilo and coming to terms with Stitch.
Wilbur never thought that he might have been the catalyst for Alice's going.
That's why, when Andy seemed to show up more often in Wilbur's life, it was exceedingly strange to him.
Usually, if he was Andy around, the two would make unfriendly eye contact and ignore each other. But since Andy had started hanging around, he would never take his eyes off of Wilbur.
It was almost like he was waiting.
One night, when Wilbur was walking home alone from Tiana's, a rarity since his friendship with Lilo, he realized that Andy was following him.
It had been another night where, as Wilbur laughed with friends, Andy stared at him from afar.
However, with the two now alone, Wilbur decided that if there was conflict to be had, he better face it head on.
"What is it, Davis?" he asked, annoyed but not angry. Andy was still a few yards off but waited to respond until he walked closer.
"Robinson, do you know why my girlfriend left town?" To Andy, the question was obviously answerable and nearly rhetorical. To Wilbur, the question had no answer and irked him even more.
"No one knows why your girlfriend left town. What does it matter what I think?"
Andy stayed silent for a few minutes, skeptically eyeing his enemy. "Are you joking or do you really not know?"
It was Wilbur's turn to act skeptical. Andy turned livid.
"You selfish brute! Alice left because of you!"
Wilbur flushed. Flashbacks of heated moments with Alice played in his mind. One in particular…
Andy saw the pieces fall into place in Wilbur's eyes. "That's right, Robinson. When you kissed Alice by force, she couldn't take it. She couldn't handle it in her mind."
Andy, filled with rage, had puffed out his chest, balled his fists, and reared back to hit Wilbur square in the jaw.
Something in Wilbur broke. "It was me? Really?"
Andy deflated. He couldn't do it. As repelled as he was by Wilbur's behavior and that he had caused Alice to leave, he couldn't hit him. Something had changed in him recently, making Wilbur uncommonly capable of remorse. While his assault was inexcusable, Alice had made her choice herself… a truth Andy couldn't seem to grasp however many times he repeated it to himself.
"Yeah, man. Christopher Robin just told me a few nights ago. I just felt like I needed to confront you about it." Andy folded his arms.
Wilbur looked up from the ground to look Andy in the face. "Look, I'm sorry, Andy. If I had known…" He trailed off, sighing. "I'm a better person now, but I wasn't a bad person before. Rash, forceful, misguided, but searching for something, even though I did so in the wrong places." Andy grunted his agreement, but Wilbur continued. "Can I help you in any way?"
Andy was stunned. This wasn't how he had expected this to go at all.
"Just… keep an eye out, OK?" He shoved his hands in his pockets. "And… treat Lilo better than you did Alice."
Wilbur smiled a little. "You got it." As Andy started walking away, he called out, "Hey." Andy paced back. Wilbur raised his brows and stuck out a hand. "We're good?"
Andy shook it. "Yeah. Good. Not friends, but good."
"Good." Wilbur said, each man walking back to their homes for some much needed rest.
Bonnie had come to town to see Andy. That was her primary goal. And she had accomplished it… she had helped him uncover the resentment he still held and had tried to provide him with a new hope for his and Alice's future.
What she wasn't expecting to do was find out just how weird Disneyland was.
Bonnie had come from her mother's home in Southern California for the summer and was expecting to find Disneyland similar to her hometown.
What she found instead was a population of all sorts of different people living in a bubble of their own. They didn't seem to care about politics, social issues, or global affairs outside of their own little radius. In fact, they didn't seem to know anything about outside affairs at all.
The more Bonnie thought about it, the more she realized that she couldn't remember the recent past as well as she ought to. She wasn't sure if she took a car, a train, or a plane to get to Disneyland. The specifics of her last few days at her home now seemed fuzzy in memory. It was almost as if her past was out of focus, but her time in Disneyland was 20/20.
She knew from the talk of the town that there were certain citizens that seemed to ask more questions than others. Jasmine and Alice, before she left, were two of the most skeptical.
It was intuition that took her to Mama Odie's. As she stood outside the old house, looking at the front door, pondering walking up and knocking, she saw Odie's beady eyes peering from under the pleats of the window's curtain. The curtain fell closed quickly when Bonnie's eye wandered over it, and all appeared quiet, dark, and still within afterwards.
Bonnie shrugged. She might as well find something out while she was there. She walked up to the front door and knocked, expectantly watching at the peephole, not in the least surprise when the door snapped open not even a second after she had knocked. Confidently yet questioningly, she stepped inside.