Two is Company (House of Anubis)

Chapter 36: The Arrival

If the seven hour plane ride from Newark International Airport to Heathrow Airport felt long, then the four hour train ride (with stops and changes) from Heathrow Airport to Liverpool, England somehow felt even longer. And don't get Eddie started on the cab drive to Amun Academy from the train station. It may have only been a half an hour at most, but somehow that felt the longest of all.

It had nothing to do with the length of time, either.

Things were tense lately, and that was putting it lightly. Eddie couldn't even be too mad though, considering it was mostly his fault... even if he'd never admit it.

See, part of the problem lay in the fact that in a little under a year, Eddie was no closer to any answers about being the Osirian than he was before he'd even discovered he was the Osirian. Even with getting filled in on some— but not all— of the weird kids clique's (or Sibuna as they called themselves) lore and with access to all their previous knowledge, they were coming up tails; it was starting to grate on Eddie's nerves.

It didn't help that Patricia had up and dumped him out of the blue two weeks into August at the tail end of her visit to America. It still had him reeling, despite the brave face he put on for his mom and sister... she'd been so happy the whole time. He knew she'd been. Sure, there were some tense, late nights while they took time to do some more dead-end research into his mythological background, but the trip was going great.

They'd been close, and everyone could tell. Kira and her friends spent more hours of their day teasing the pair than they did breathing, and that's how Eddie knew he wasn't imagining it. With anyone else he'd ever been with, male or female, no one had bothered really acknowledging them, let alone giving them a playful hard time (except for that one time that they vowed to never speak of).

Bottom line was, Patricia and Eddie had been happy, and he was fully ready to admit he was in love with her. Yeah, yeah, he was seventeen— so what? He knew what love was, okay? And he had been so certain, so damn certain, she'd felt the same. So he'd told her as much.

And then she ran away.

So yeah. And that was only a small part of his problem. Another factor into why the journey back to dreary old England felt so frickin' long, and it had everything to do with the 5'5" polyglot reading a novel thicker than her calf muscle in the seat beside him.

He'd grown admittedly distant from his sister over the course of the year. It wasn't like he'd meant to, it was just that he was so busy trying to figure out this major part of himself, and was spending so much time with Sibuna, and she wouldn't stop looking at him in the same way she had when he broke that stupid glass ball when they were younger—

He just needed some space was all. He'd at least had a little reprieve when she'd spent the first month of summer break with Mara's family. That had been nice, but then she came back, and ugh! He didn't want to be annoyed with her, because she hadn't really done anything to be annoyed at. But he couldn't really help it.

And anyway, he had bigger problems. In fact, the biggest problem: the one person who was supposed to maybe help him out, throw him a bone, or at least maybe help him shoulder the burden that had suddenly been thrust suddenly upon his shoulders had totally bailed on not just him, but literally everyone. And he was the only one who knew.

That's right. Nina Martin, the fucking the Chosen One, had abandoned ship, and left him with a letter to give to her ex-boyfriend who still didn't know he was an ex. And the worst part was he couldn't even be mad at her, because she'd made sure he knew exactly why this had happened:

"Eddie, my Gran is sick again," Nina had abruptly called him one night about two days after Patricia had dumped him. "Like... really sick. I need to be there for her."