“Chloé…Chloé!”

I blinked awake to see Antoinette leaning over my bed, her red waves curtaining around me, scant light limning her face in the dark room. This seemed too fanfickian to be true.

“What?” I shot up, rubbing my eyes. “Am I late for class?”

“No.” She dropped a towel and hairbrush on my lap. “Get ready quickly, alright?”

I looked at our window. No light peeked behind the curtains. The only light was coming from a low lamp. Her tone was neutral besides her usual twinge of impatience, so I guessed the dorms weren’t on fire, at least. “What’s going on?”

“We’re going on a trip today.”

“I…what? Class field trip?”

“No, we are going on a trip.” She smirked.

I had nothing to say to that besides ???. I took her towel and instructions and went off to our room lavatory, still a little unsteady in my exhaustion, to get ready.

I obediently showered (hooray for information gaps in the game being filled by modern-ish technology–reality was an aesthetic mess), trying to remember if we’d planned something and I’d forgotten. It was Wednesday. Nothing would be going on. Was she spiriting me away? Were we going to do some cliche girly adventure in town?

When I was all washed up, I found that Antoinette had set clothing for me on the counter: a folded-up dress with a cropped, thick woolen vest and warm stockings. She’d added a matching beret-like hat that I’d definitely not bought myself.

I emerged from the lavatory, all washed and brushed and clothed, and learned exactly why Antoinette had done that: Rémi was sitting on her bed, clearly ready for our field trip in his warm jacket and boots.

I looked between them, alarmed. “Where the hell are we going?”

~*~

“Here you are, ladies,” Rémi announced, coming up behind us. “Two of the finest breakfast croissants in all of Altolia.”

Rémi handed me and Antoinette our woefully-late breakfasts. I was pretty damn sure that breakfast croissants were not period-accurate, but I was so starving after our three-hour carriage ride that Rémi could have given me a Happy Meal bag and I wouldn’t have questioned it.

We took to the streets of Altolia. I’d been braced for a barrage of narrated memories to hit me as soon as we got out of the carriage, but all I got was a faceful of bright sunlight and wobbly legs from the rickety ride.

Yep, this was all Antoinette’s idea. According to her, Rémi had mentioned that he wanted to head to Altolia to make moves on his character arc–by that I mean make reparations with someone he wronged as a teen–and Antoinette had innocently suggested that us girls keep him company. “I suggested it for you,” she’d whispered to me when we had a second of privacy for her to explain, “so you could look for more clues or whatnot. Rémi doesn’t need to know.”

Ace Attorney investigation field trip, hooray! We’d only needed a Fontaine carriage to take us, since none of the school or hamlet ones would dare go this far, even if our reasoning was as compelling as, “We just wanna go!”

Now, Rémi snatched a newspaper out of a streetside basket (he’d inhaled his breakfast before I even got a taste of mine). NO NEW LEADS IN GAGNON CASE; FORMER EMPLOYEES WEIGH IN. Instead of pointing that headline out, though, Rémi was much more interested in something else mentioned on the front page, and went riffling through the paper to find the rest of the story. He opened it to Antoinette and me.

There it was! That famous picture of Étienne as a young teenager, smoking with a couple faceless other boys. The background of a horse track was sketched in. It drew the eye much more than the bland headline about how he’d done the speech at the newest orphanage opening last night. Classy.

Rémi scoffed. “What’d I tell you? They use any chance they can to throw this thing in the papers.”

Antoinette sighed. “How lucky he is that the Chapelles didn’t inform the papers about our little escapade.”

I took the paper from Rémi to get a better look. “This was like ten years ago! How do people still care?”

I shouldn’t be that surprised. Magazines used images of Britney Spears shaving her head for years and years, even when my world had the benefit of a metric ton more celebrities to gossip about and more crazy images to trade around at light speed.

Rémi held out a hand to get the paper back. I pretended to be engrossed in the article. Our trio kept walking down the street as I flipped through it, flagging behind a little bit.

In the Love Blooming timeline, we were right after the first route-specific events. If my memories weren’t fooling me, then the papers should have, by now, caught on to the symbol used by that gang of goons who burned the Gagnon estate. They wouldn’t know who it was attached to–in fact, they’d know so little that they’d be pretty unabashed in publishing it everywhere, demanding anyone with answers come forward–but since it was found in the estate wreckage, they knew it was connected to the arson.

And the murders.

Did they know yet that it was a double murder?

Rémi was explaining who he was looking for to Antoinette, stretching his arms above his head. I half-listened to their jibes–she was teasing him about being a hellion once upon a time–and got to the end of the paper with no mention of the symbol. I flipped through backwards. Where was it?

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

If I was late, there was no way the paper would simply drop the topic entirely; what news would they have to replace it? Stories about Étienne kissing puppies?? Another rehash of the case, begging for information? In the game, you found out about the symbol once it crawled its way to the La Belle Lavande student papers, and there was no freakin’ way they’d get the scoop before Altolia itself.

I finished the paper once more, left staring at a hand-drawn ad for a barber shop and their newfangled style of shears.

~*~

Antoinette used her high charisma roll to get Rémi and his target to think they really ought to speak in private for a couple hours. That left us girls time to look for clues.

Antoinette hailed a cab. She’d hidden most of her bright red hair under a paisley handkerchief to not immediately out herself as the Delphine heiress. Maybe that’s why the driver hit us with glares of suspicion and immediate dislike when she announced we wanted to see the Gagnon estate.

“The ruins? Now what business d’you got there?”

I opened my mouth to make some excuse or beg or something, but Antoinette touched my wrist, speaking primly instead. “You won’t drive us there?”

“Not a chance.”

“Then we’d like to be dropped off, let’s say, a fifteen-minute walk from the Gagnon estate? Perhaps at a shop or garden if that makes you feel better? Your choice.”

He grumbled a bit…but accepted Antoinette’s cash and got the horses moving.

He let us off at a small roadside park, full of kids and finely-dressed ladies chatting under the trees. He made a big show of checking his horses’ equipment, huffing and coughing, drawing eyes from the park-goers.

Antoinette strode up to him–and before she could speak, he jerked a thumb at the park and a small offshoot from its main pathway that wound uninvitingly into the trees. She took my arm and off we went in that direction.

I asked once we were out of earshot, “What the heck was that about?”

“He must think we’re nothing better than gossipmongers or thieves. He didn’t want to have to lie to the guard about driving us there if we got caught.” She shrugged. “Now he can tell them he dropped off two anonymous young ladies at the park, and he saw nothing and suspected nothing and so is guilty of nothing, and that is all.”

“And you guessed all that from him asking us one question?”

“I’m a Delphine. I’m used to dealing with people trying to protect themselves from me.”

The walk was more like twenty-five minutes, but he hadn’t lied to us entirely: on the other side of the woods was a long stretch of iron fence, keeping in rolling green grounds that led to a distant, strange pile of black. The fence was overgrown with white-flower ivy that shuddered and grew into strange shapes as I walked by, reacting to my nerves.

“Do you recognise it?” Antoinette asked, pointing out the little greenhouse, cherry trees, and gazebos that peppered the grounds like fairy houses.

I shook my head.

We reached the gate. It was locked at the end of the driveway, perfectly presented…in stark opposition to the ruins beyond. We stepped through and approached the mass of matchsticks.

No narration hit me. My head seemed empty, echoing with the lack of context, the lack of emotion. I’d been in Marie’s shoes over and over again–fic after fic, daydream after daydream, meta after meta–and now all that felt so sanitized and hollow.

“What about now?”

“Nothing. Is that bad?”

“Why would it be?”

Because not being reminded meant…what? That I couldn’t take over for Marie totally? That the history of the body and this world was too far for me to reach? That without the narration nattering in my ear, maybe I’d never figure this out in time?

What did in time even mean for me?

“Well, we made it this far. Here.” Antoinette lifted herself over the fence, careful to gather her wool skirt in a handful so it didn’t catch on the metal. She offered a hand to me.

Her palm was warm and soft, her grip sure, as she helped my shorter self over the fence. I couldn’t help checking over my shoulders as she strode confidently through the yard.

Ash and flecks of burned who-knows-what fluttered between our delicate shoes. The grass was crisped, the trees bent over in ghastly mourning, guarding the imprint of the mansion-that-once-was. A long, winding driveway, lined with thick trees and rolling fronds, lead up to the mass of burned remains and a carriage garage with generally unharmed horse stalls. I’d written stories about Marie’s society parties, her childhood, her first kisses and lesbian awakenings and first words in this house, this house that was now gone.

In a way, all that was left of it in this world was my memory. Not Marie’s, not even really Chloé’s, but Hanna’s.

There was no such thing as police tape in this random time in French pseudo-history, so nothing stopped us from entering the ruin that was the Gagnon house. Antoinette held my wrist tightly as we walked the tightropes of safe pathways through the wreckage–beams, ash, broken dishes, cracked marble and hardwood that burst with the heat, scraps of curtain.

Antoinette stopped us. She gave me a pointed look, eyebrow cocked.

“Still nothing!” I admitted. “But, well…if I don’t remember, did it really happen to me at all?”

Antoinette averted her bright blue eyes. “Let’s say you are the Gagnon girl. Even if you don’t remember, even if you don’t understand it, it did change you, obviously. It did make you.”

I watched her, this strange girl who I’d seen a dozen versions of. The different Antoinettes that appeared in Love Blooming depending on your choices, the Antoinette who lurked in the background of Sylvain fanfics and tried to sink every other ship, the delicately prim Antoinette who stacistar wrote, the determined, fiercely sexy Antoinette I wrote, and all the women in between.

How many were still missing? Who was left on the cutting room floor, and who still spun around the minds of the writers? What did they mean for her, now that I was trying, like I did over and over behind my keyboard, to make her something different?

“I want to look around,” I said. Antoinette stepped aside so I could start fumbling through the wreckage.

I kept an eye out for that symbol. In the game, it was found on a necklace, like a dog tag, symbolizing the gang connections. It was broken off. The implication hit me, now that I could smell the ash and feel the wood splintering under my shoes: did one of the Gagnons grab the necklace to fight them off? Was it the mother, the father, or…was it Marie?

I could find nothing. Nothing but a whole destroyed world–a world that was supposedly mine, but that I didn’t recognise at all.

The game skated over Marie’s grief of losing her family and every single trapping of her life before the attacks, except, of course, the numbers in her bank account. I didn’t care before–it was a classic story element I’d seen a kajillion times before. Love heals all. I didn’t expect much depth out of Love Blooming’s backstory except for some stray tears for your boy of choice to kiss off Marie’s cheeks.

Here, now, walking through the dregs of her life? It felt like a tasteless true crime podcast, narrowing her past life into tropes and shocks and cheesy musical stings and off-colour jokes whose apologies couldn’t totally get rid of the stench of disrespect.

She wasn’t me. But she was real.

The hiss and clatter of fallen debris snapped me out of it. I looked up–did Antoinette fall?

Nope, she was a few paces behind me, head up too, alert and glaring.

More steps, somewhere in this mountainous crag of a destroyed house. Antoinette reached my side. My heart trilled in my chest. Could it be the arsonists? Was it now that they left their symbol behind? Would it be me who tore it from their necks?

A figure ducked into the half-collapsed, black doorway.