Content Warning: Mentions of death and illness; hospitals
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"I came back for you."
There was no answer, not that he expected one. Regardless of her long since snuffed consciousness, Nora was still alive, and her body still housed a soul. Whether she could actually hear him or not, Victor still preferred to believe that his voice comforted her, even through its metallic filter. After all, in the dead of night, there was no one else around to hear him, aside from the now-subdued night watchmen and graveyard shift nurses; he had seen to assuring that they would not interfere with his mission.
These idiot doctors didn't know how to care for someone in Nora's condition. Without his intervention, she would die.
Her room in the ICU was dim and darkly hazy, lit up only by the whirring, blinking machines all around her fragile body. The sight was enough to make her husband's breath hitch, even though he knew what he was in for when he entered. Seeing her like this was enough to move a grown man to tears—but of course, Victor wasn't necessarily one of those anymore, not unless he could still be considered a human being.
But this was no time for morbid musings or emotional fits; be he man or monster, he had a job to do, and he intended to do it efficiently. There was no time to waste, for every moment Nora spent outside of a cryogenic freezing tank was a moment that much closer to death.
The work was quick; he knew exactly what to do, how to remove the many tubes and wires attached to his wife's body, how to hold her just so as to keep her from sustaining yet more physical trauma.
Ferris Boyle would pay for what he did to her, and the unwanted changes that he'd forced upon Victor Fries as well. He ruined two lives, and for this reason, he was destined to lose his own prematurely as retribution.
But even that was a secondary task when measured against the preservation of Nora's life: the greatest treasure that Boyle had ever attempted to embezzle.