Archive of Our Own ^beta

Warning; swearing, canon child abuse.

When Miranda suggests going for a walk up to the rock, Sara immediately asks to go along. She was vaguely surprised she was allowed to go, she was so much younger than Miranda, Irma or Marion but it figured that nobody really cared if she got hurt. She wasn’t resentful of it in this case though. If it meant she got to do what she wanted, then who was she to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sara follows behind Miranda as they weave their way through the trees. It's a gorgeous day, with sun streaming through the green leaves of the trees and it's much cooler under their shade than in the burning heat of the direct sun. 

As she walks, she allows herself to get caught up in her thoughts, daydreaming about poetry and stories that she could write and ignoring Edith’s constant stream of complaints trying to focus on the sounds of the bush instead.  

Hanging out with Mike isn’t half bad in Albert’s option. He may be a bit of a toff, but he makes for good company at least and a great audience for Albert’s stories (even half of them is blown out of the water or straight up lies, Mike doesn’t need to know that). The two of them are sitting by the side of the creek passing a bottle of alcohol between them.  

It's a lot more entertaining than standing around waiting for the boss and his misses to finish that's for sure. 

A couple of Shelia that look like they’re from the fancy college appear out of the trees and start to head across the creek. He turns to Mike to make some comments on them but one of the girls catches his eye. 

She looks like his kid sister. 

Admittedly she looked a hell of a lot older than Sara was last time he saw her but it's been years, that wasn’t exactly a shock. But she's too familiar to be anyone else. 

“Sara!” he yells, cupping his hands around his mouth. out of the corner of his eye he sees Mike turn towards him in surprise.

The girl turns to face him. She stops dead in the middle of the water as she spots him, looking like she’d just seen a ghost.

“Sara!” someone calls from among the trees on the side of the bank. Sara turns to figure out where it's coming from but once she lays eyes on who it is, she freezes in place, despite the water running over her shoes and soaking her stockings. 

Her brother Albert, who she hadn’t seen in years, not since he’d aged out of the orphanage was sitting among the trees on the other side of the creek, a young man she didn’t know beside him. Albert looked different than he did last time she saw him (her brain is quick to note the tattoos lacing up his arm) but it couldn’t be anyone else. 

 Cautiously but filled with hope, she responds “Bertie?”

His face breaks into a massive smile and he jumps to his feet, shoving the bottle he is holding into the hands of his friend. It takes him not long to reach her and when Albert does, he pulls her into a hug like she hadn’t since the last time she’d seen him. 

Albert ruffles her hair as they break apart. 

Sara got so caught up in the moment that she forgot that the others were there at all. Miranda, Irma, Marion and Edith stood on the bank, waiting with faces full of curiosity. 

Sara should introduce them. 

She shifts her feet nervously. It's not like her to care what others think, too many stares and assumptions that she's nothing but trouble have blinded her to what others think, but Miranda is different. She cares about what Miranda thinks of her in a way she doesn’t about anyone else. She wants Miranda to like her brother even if she doesn’t give a hoot about the others.

“This is my brother Albert” she says “Albert this is Miranda, Irma, Edith and Marion. They go to school with me.”

“Crickey” Albert says, titling his hat back “don’t tell me you go that fancy school.”

“I won’t then” Sara says, jokingly.

She missed her brother and to have it turn out he was right there was a miracle and a half. She wondered what would have happened if Mrs. Appleyard had forbid her from going like she’d threatened, if they would have ever reunited. 

Sara hadn’t expected to ever see her brother again. If she hasn’t decided to follow Miranda to the rock, who knows. 

Albert wasn’t the kinda guy to believe in fate or other such crap, religion does nothing for him either, but this is one hell of a chance. He’d thought he’d never get to see his little sis again, what were the odds that they would find each other? A small chance in hell that's what. 

Now that they’ve found each other he's not going to lose her again.

“So where are you sheilas headed?” he says, trying to sound the same as ever (he's pretty sure he succeeds).

“We’re headed to Hanging rock” Miranda says, pointing at the dark mass looming over the surrounding bush. 

“Hanging rock huh” Albert remarked “that's a pretty dangerous hike for ladies like you”.

“Um hello” a familiar and overly fancy voice sounded from behind him. He'd forgotten Mike was even there. “I’m Micheal Fitzhubert, I figure I should probably introduce myself”. 

Micheal hovers while the girls introduce themselves and then they delve off into some silly questions about how the sheilas are allowed to go off by themselves. 

Albert ignores them, tuning out the conversation in Favour of catching up with his kid sister.  He gets the story of how she ended up at Appleyard College of all the blooming places and he tells the tale of how he got his tats.  At some point while they're having a chitchat, the sheilas bugger off to continue up to the rock. Albert barely even notices. Mike goes back to his uncle and aunt, says something about ‘convincing them to stay longer’. 

What can he say? There is a lot of shit to talk about. 

Everything’s going bloody brilliant, he might as well have found a pot of gold at the end of the blooming rainbow, when the sound of sharp, piercing screams echo down the rock. 

Albert jumps to his feet at the noise without thinking. “You should get back,” he says. 

Sara agrees. He gives her the address of where he’s working, and she says she’ll write.  And gee is he darn proud of her for that, that’s something he’s never had a taste for. 

He watches as she disappears off into the bush that she’d come from and vaguely thinks about who's causing all this ruckus and what’s making them shrike like a blooming galah. 

When Sara finds out Miranda is missing, she almost breaks down crying in front of everyone but manages to hold it together to make it back to her room. 

This day has managed to go from one of the best days of her life to one of the worst. 

She doesn’t quite know how she feels about Miranda, her feelings might be romantic in nature (even if she knows Miranda does not feel the same, for her age at least) but she’s not sure if it’s because Miranda is one of only a few people who are nice to her. Or if that’s even a thing at all. Still, she flops on to her bed and weeps, the room haunted by the ghost of its other occupant. Sara can’t help but blame herself for the disappearance. If she had gone rather than stayed with her brother or if they hadn’t stopped at all maybe this wouldn’t have happened. 

She can hear the ghost of Miranda’s voice in the back of her head, telling her she’s being ‘a silly little goose’. 

She hopes they’re found soon. She can’t bear to think that Miranda is dead, no matter how likely she knows it is. 

—- 

Albert gets letters from Sara pretty often. He has to get Mike to read them but since Mike doesn’t seem to give a rat's arse about this and he trusts Mike to keep it to himself, it's fine with Albert.  Mostly the letters are about what's going on up at the school, about the state of tension at the school. He's not surprised by the state of things. He can't imagine having three kids go missing is all that good for morale.

He couldn’t give a shit about how the school is going though, especially since it's nothing all that out there. No, what he cares about is how Sara is doing. She seems to miss Miranda a hell of a lot.   How Sara writes about the head, Mrs. Appleyard or whatever her name is, makes Albert want to punch something. He’d spent so much of their childhood trying to look after his sister, even though they kept the boys and girls separate that not being able to do anything now made him want to throw something. 

He’ll figure out something to get her the hell out there but for now he’ll do what he can from a fare. 

In other news, Mike's downright obsessed with finding the girls, he says it’s because they remind him of his sisters back home, but Alberts is not too sure about that. (He hopes it’s not romantic, he’s always liked both girls and boys and he’d rather likes Mike if you know what he means). 

Mikes comes up with some hare-brained plan to go to the rock and look for himself, somehow convinced that he’ll find something that all the blooming search teams missed. Personally, Albert thinks Mikes an idiot, but he’ll come along anyway. If just so Mike doesn’t do something stupid and gets himself killed, at least because Mike is his friend.

No matter how much Sara hates Appleyard College, it's still not worse than the orphanage. 

That doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking about running away and crashing wherever Bertie is staying. It can’t be worse than this bloody school where all the teachers hate her and all of her classmates and it's certainly better than going back to the orphanage, and she can’t ignore the panic that swoops in her gut everytime Mrs Appleyard threatens to send her back. 

She almost thinks at least one of her problems had been solved when it's announced that one of the missing girls is found, but that feeling vanishes when she finds out that it is Irma not Miranda then proceeds to feel awfully guilty about it. 

It's not that she's not happy that Irmas was found but she desperately misses Miranda.

After Mike somehow pulls off the bloody impossible and finds one of the missing Sheilas, Miss Irma comes to stay with Mike’s family. She isn’t all that different from what Albert was expecting but he does think it's darn weird that she doesn’t remember a single lick of anything. 

He's also pretty surprised when Mike tells him Miss Irma has been asking about him. He’d assumed she wouldn’t give a shit about his part in the rescue, but she apparently does and when he does get to talk to her, she's pretty darn nice.

There's something wrong with Mrs. Appleyard. She's never liked Sara, outright despised her infact, but she's getting crueler and meaner. She also seems less like she's in control at all times. The strict discipline of the school is falling apart at the seams, girls openly chatting and giggling in classes and at meals. 

All of this comes to a head when Irma comes to visit the school before she leaves for Europe. Saras still not fully sure what happened, it was like something came over the other girls and the sound of the screaming made her want to cover her ears, but she couldn’t be due to being strapped to a board, supposedly to ‘fix her posture’. 

She's not entirely sure she wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, but it still feels awfully real.

 Albert wasn’t expecting Mike to be the one to figure out his problem. The only thing Albert can come up with is to have Sara stay with him but it's not like his room is that big, and while sure it technically could fit both of them.   Mike suggests the old gardener's cottage. It's tucked in a mostly forgotten back corner and it's not exactly in top shape but Mike’s pretty sure he’ll have no problem convincing his uncle to let Albert move it. 

He writes to Sara. His writing isn’t great, but it gets the point across.

When Sara hears the news from Albert she starts packing immediately. He says he’ll come and get her tomorrow, but she immediately is filled with the urge to start. 

It's the sort of thing she used to daydream about as a kid after Albert got kicked out, that her brother would come and get her, and they’d strike out on their own together. She wondered if her guardian would even notice if she left or if Mrs. Appleyard would even care. 

She barely got any sleep that night, thinking over the possibilities that the future had now that it didn’t look like she would waste away at the college.

Sneaking out isn’t even that hard, she basically just walks about the door while the college is asleep. Sara leaves behind a note saying that she's leaving so nobody worries or comes looking and once she gets out the drive Alberts is already waiting for her.

Sara settles in well. She gets on well enough with Mike, at least before he leaves for Queensland. And at least compared to her letters, she seems a hell of a lot happier than she did up the blasted school.

Then Albert gets a letter. It's not from Mike, who hasn’t been away for a letter to reach them. No, it's from Irma’s father of all the damn people, with a check for a thousand pounds. 

“Blimey” he says, showing the check to Sara. 

She stares at it with wide eyes and it's clear that both of them are thinking about the possibility it represents. 

“You know” he says, “I’ve never been up to Queensland”.