Disclaimer: The Show Victorious, its characters and other associated copyrights are property of someone else and not me.

Where's Tori

Chapter 1 – Missing

Jade's POV

"Hey honey, it's me. I just finished in studio for the day. I'm going to stop at the store to get milk on the way home. Love you."

The above is a voice mail. It was 6 seconds long and was left at 6:47 PM on June the 17th. Too anyone, the message doesn't look very out of the ordinary. At the time I was on a movie set and didn't get her call. So she left a message.

It's a very special message, for me at least. Why, do you ask?

Well first of all that message, which I have managed to keep, is 9 years, 7 months and 22 days old. It was also the very last time I heard from Tori.

Shortly after she left that message, she was last seen by the receptionist at the recording studio where she was working on her second album. She said a cheerful good night to the receptionist and left the building.

She never made it home.

At the time we were both 20 years old and a happy couple. She was working on her first album and my acting career had begun to take off. We had our problems as all couples do, but we were happy.

We were happy until that day, when I came home to an empty house. I didn't worry right away, figuring she stopped at Cat's or perhaps got sucked into a sale at the mall.

By 8:30 I started to get worried. I had called and texted Tori to no avail. I called everyone I could think of; no one had seen or heard from Tori. Her father, who was a cop, started the search right away.

Her car was found 3 days later, in the parking lot of a grocery store about 3 miles from the studio. Nothing appeared amiss at all about it. Just a green Honda accord parked like any other car. It hadn't been broken into or damaged in any way. The store had no security cameras on the outside of the building and no one remembered seeing anything.

Tori had simply vanished.

As the hours and days ticked by, I grew more frantic. The reporters splashed it all across the headlines, Upcoming pop star Tori Vega, Vanishes mysteriously. I sobbed continuously for months after she disappeared. Cat, Beck, Andre, Robbie, even Trina tired to console me. They would say she's coming back. I still was devastated.

Searches were made in local parks, everywhere. I used to just drive around for hours, just in the hopes of seeing her. Sometimes I would park in the spot where her car was found, and cry.

When someone you love dies, you know it's the end of their life. You gradually accept that and move on. When someone just disappears, you never know what happened. Are they dead? Are they alive? Are they in pain? Did they leave you on purpose? Those and a thousand other questions rattle through your brain. Questions that never get answered. They just sit in the back of your mind haunting you. Much like a wound the never heals.

My beloved Tori was gone. Ever since, I feel like my heart had been ripped in two and one half of it stolen. There's been an empty feeling in my chest ever since. I've never been able to fill it.

I have rituals that I go through every year. On Tori's birthday, I light a candle for her, put it in my window, and get drunk. On the anniversary of her disappearance, I'll drive to the parking lot where her car was found. I'll just sit there in my car and cry, then I'll get drunk. I am high functioning alcoholic to it bluntly.

Though I stayed functional enough to keep acting, I was broken inside. I stayed faithful to Tori for almost 2 years. One night at a bar, a woman who barred a close resemblance to Tori came on to me. I just had to have Tori, even if it was a poor copy of her.

I never stopped after that. Girl after girl and the occasional guy, I would take home. No one could ever fill the hole left by Tori. The drinking couldn't either. I was a successful actress but quickly garnered a reputation for sleeping around a lot. In the course of time I even touched off a scandal when it was found I was having an affair with the wife of a local conservative politician. I destroyed that marriage and he chose not to run for reelection. I was constant tabloid fodder.

My public loved my movies and the love the scandal and controversy I caused as well. I no longer cared. I just did what I did to kill the pain and try to fill the void in my soul. People who knew and worked with me, quickly learned one thing. You don't mention Tori in my presence. Just the mention of her name sent a sharp pain through my insides that felt like a wound being torn open.

I would be in a club sometimes and one of her songs would be played. I would always leave. People actually began to think that I hated Tori's music, since I refused to listen to it. If it came on a radio I would insist it be turned off.

It was actually the opposite. I loved her music. I loved the sound of her voice. But it was so painful to here it, I could only listen to it alone. From time to time I would put on her album, pull out her box of things and cry until I fell apart into tiny little pieces.

My friends, urged me to move on and find someone else. Someone that would last longer than the short flings I was well known for. I tried a couple of times, but I couldn't do it. I would find some reason to break it off after a few months. The memory of Tori was a stone around my neck.

I gradually lost touch with the others. I think they got tired of me constantly acting out like I did. They also got tired of banging their heads against the wall in trying to help me. The last of my friends from Hollywood arts I spoke to was Cat and that was just after Tori was declared legally dead.

She tried to console me and invited me over to her and Beck's home. She married Beck after high school. Instead I went on a 2 week drinking binge and crashed my car.

Though my personal life was still in shambles, my career kept going. I somehow managed to compartmentalize and shut Tori out of my mind when I was on set.

I wrote and directed my first movie last year to rave reviews. It was a horror movie called "I'm sorry" It centers on a bullying group of vain, self centered and cruel cheerleaders at a high school. They constantly bully and humiliate a unpopular girl who eventually kills herself. After that the girls are one by one, murdered. But in each case it's made to look like they killed themselves. No one knows the suicides are actually murders. In the end the last and meanest cheerleader, driven mad by the unexplained suicides of all her friends, hangs herself. In the end, the killer is never found out and life goes on. I patterned the meanest cheerleader after me and the unpopular girl after Tori. I even had an actress's that looked like Tori and I to play the parts. It's a form of celluloid suicide, for the guilt I feel becuase of how I treated Tori before we started to date.

It got rave reviews and killed at the box office. I'm even getting offers to write a sequel. Kind of hard, since everyone is dead. I have a huge house overlooking the ocean, several cars and a career going like crazy. So my public doesn't seem to mind the scandals and broken hearts I leave behind, as they love my movies.

I'd give everything up, just to have Tori back in my arms. But the dream of having Tori back, has long since died.

I still listen to that message. I've heard it hundreds of times. I listen over and over, in hopes of getting some clue to what was about to happen to her. I listen to every little change in tone or pitch in the 6 second message. But if the message had any answers, they've so far eluded me.

Tonight, I woke up in the middle of the night with the beginnings of a hangover and a throbbing headache. I'm not alone as I took home a make up artist named Sara. She's snoring loudly next to me. It reminds me of Tori's snoring, and I hate being reminded of Tori. Too fucking painful. I think I'll forget to call her ever again, after this.

I got up, drank some water, took an aspirin and used the bathroom. But as I walked back to the bed, I spotted a light flashing on my phone. I left it on the charger on silent, but still turned on. I remember no calls being there when I went to sleep around 1 am.

I was half tempted to ignore it until the morning, but something made me pick up the phone.

I looked at the notification screen.

6 missed calls

6 voice mail messages.

"What the fuck" I muttered as I pulled my long hair back and pulled it back in a ponytail.

I checked out the callers. 1 from Beck, 2 from Cat and 2 from Andre and one from an unknown number.

I starred at the screen in disbelief. I hadn't spoken to Cat or Beck in 2 years and I hadn't spoke to Andre in 4 years. Why are they all calling me tonight at 4 in the dam morning?

I was about to play the voice mails when the phone lit up with another call. The caller Id read. Andre.

Still partially asleep, but very curious, I answered the phone.

"What the fuck do you want Andre? It's four in the fucking morning. Can't you tell time asshole?" I barked into the phone.

"Jade, Jade." He quickly said, sounding very excited and nearly out of breath. "You'll never believe it."

I was loosing patience. "Believe what." I snapped.

"It's Tori, she's alive, the police found her." He said breathlessly.

I was inspired to write this the day those three girls were found alive in Ohio and wrote the first 2 chapters in a matter of hours. The whole thing just came to me and I had to at least put it on paper. I was hesitant to put out the story at all. There are people right now who are missing and family members that wonder constantly where they are. We can only hope some of these other missing can find their way home.

I asked and several people encouraged me to put out the story. It won't be too terribly long. But who knows, it could stretch out if I think of a good story.

So here it is, the first part of my story. Jade is a very successful actress/writer/director but inside is emotionally crippled and has a drinking problem. She's unable to maintain any sort of long term relationship and has driven away everyone close to her.