WIP7

Oh my god.

It is you.

It really is you.


Believe it or not, there are a lot of former slavegirls that you freed living in this town. We have a little community here. They'll want to know that you're here just as much as me!


When you were busy helping people, and fighting the R.S.V., nobody knew how to find you. And that made sense. You were one man against an army, you had to lay low, be unfindable. But when the R.S.V. collapsed a few years ago, when it was finally over, we thought you'd surface. We thought we'd be able to find you, to show our gratitude for what you did for us. But you dropped off the face of the planet. No contact, no news of your exploits, not even a goddamn rumor about where you might be. Many of us thought, despairingly, that you might've been killed in one of your final missions.

But I knew you had to be alive. And I've waited for you, all these years. Do you know why? Because, that night, the night when you rescued me, the night when you changed my life, we talked. The realization dawned on me that you had given me my life back, that I still had a chance to do something with it. So I told you what I wanted to do, what my dream was. I wanted to go back to the town I grew up in, the town I was stolen from, and I wanted to buy the restaurant my father owned, the one he told me that I would get to run someday. I wanted to fix it up and serve the same food my father served.

And do you remember what you said to me? You smiled, and you promised that when I did, you would come eat at my restaurant.

So I knew you were alive. I knew you'd come here eventually. It didn't matter how many years it took you to get here, I knew you would come. Because you promised.

Most of my waitresses are also women who used to be slavegirls, women that you rescued. After I got back on my feet, I thought I should help my sisters who weren't back on theirs yet. Like I said, there's a lot of the women you freed in this town, and we're a community now. We've stayed close, helped each other out.

And I told them, if a man with a missing finger on his right hand ever walks through my doors, I wanted to know immediately. It didn't matter what I was doing, what they might be interrupting. You were more important. They all knew why, and I know they felt the same way.