Her surroundings are familiar to her. All around her, the world is normal. It's the same town she grew up in, the same quiet, tired little place, filled with the same quiet, tired little souls. Individuals may have moved on, but they've been filled in quickly. The world continues, healing herself with speed.
Valkyrie smiles as she sees a girl walking home, clutching a satchel filled with books. So that's the one who's taken her place. Gary Price's own granddaughter, would you believe it?
She can't.
The girl seems happy, if a little withdrawn. The world's uncharted territory, to her, filled with wonders and hopes. She'll learn, though, as Valkyrie thinks, not a little bitterly. She'll chart the territory charted a thousand times before: she'll grow up, fall in love, live and die.
Valkyrie's in the process of all four, at the moment, and she's presently going through them alone. There's no-one she could trust to follow her steps by her side - she'd rather trail them distantly, or have them trailing her.
There were a few that tried, of course, but that never worked out. It never could have, not after she met Skulduggery. The mortals - and they were nothing but mortals now, to her, nothing but scraps of steadily decaying, magickless flesh - would forever be too young for her, the undying ones forever too old. They all had it - that trace of cynicism that she is busily cultivating.
They've seen it all. They've experienced the world's wonders, and grown tired of them. She can still feel awe, of course, but it's distant.
She never really tried mortals, never gave them much of a chance. They were nothing to her, nothing more than playthings to be put away. Her parents are old now, in a nursing home. She doesn't visit them much, these days, because they never recognize her. She's become another strange, hardened, quiet, tired face.
She's trying it with sorcerers. Early days yet, but there's a small corner of her that says, all fatalism, that it couldn't work out with them. It's not like no-one's interested any more, though the number's lessened considerably. She escaped the attentions of Fletcher Renn and Staven Weeper by saying she liked women. She avoided China Sorrows and Tanith Low by insisting she liked men.
After that, it was only the persistent ones that stayed, kept trying. Springheeled Jack. Caelan. Dusk. Murder Rose.
On reflection, she thinks, it probably says something about her that the people who try to win her affections are all in various prisons around the world. It doesn't stop her from visiting them all, whenever she's in their areas.
Except Skulduggery, of course, because it breaks her to see him, the once-fine, once-proud man, falling apart in the imprisonment cells. They've been redesigned several times, and one can now use magic within them, as long as it doesn't affect anything outside. She still doesn't know if seeing him, staring at the curls of flame in his hands, bound and trapped, is better or worse than it was in the beginning, when he had no magic to hold him in his human shape and literally became a pile of bones.
Until she decides, she won't seek him out again.
She doesn't know why she's back here now. She still hasn't made the decision to see him, and it's pointless to come all the way out here, to the house she used to inhabit, to stare inside at the adopted girl she calls her niece, and her sister and her sister-in-law.
Pointless, irrational, illogical, and yet she's here. It's bizarre.
On legs that feel wooden, she walks, and she swallows, forcing herself to start breathing again. There's nothing she can do about the way her heart is hurting. She's a respectable old woman now, even though she looks young yet, as she will forever. The aged are allowed their aches and pains.
Even if they're not physical, they're allowed their hurts.
She finds herself outside the prison, finds herself demanding to be let in, and Staven Weeper gives her a regretful, respectful glance as he opens the doors for her, behind which he is insulting her silently. Dyke whore. Just like her sister. Just like her cousins.
She meets said cousins as she walks in, her boots clacking softly across the floor. Crystal's barely more than a skeleton now, and yet there's that manic brightness to her face. She knows she's dying, and she knows that everyone is, and she's going to make the best of it. She's visiting a girl called Goethite, a tall, pretty thing with straight hair and completely black eyes. Across from that cell is encaged Murder Rose, who watches Valkyrie with a hungry smile. Carol, who has become old, who looks her age despite, or perhaps because of, being one of the most powerful Sensitives in Ireland, is talking with her.
They are hushed, and they are soft as she passes, because they know why she's here, and they know she'll slaughter them if they say the wrong thing.
She reaches the cell she was after, and its inhabitant turns to her. His grin is more manic than Crystal's, wider and brighter, and yet he, a true skeleton, has more humanity than she. It's something about the way she seems possessed, and he is still in control. Perfectly.
He looks at her, and she's thinking, to herself, that the moment he says the wrong thing, she's out of here. She's not sure what the right thing would be, but, Hell and Damnation, she needs him to say it.
"I missed you," he says.
It was the wrong thing, and she turns on her heels and walks away as quickly as her feet can take her without losing dignity. As she leaves, she hears his voice calling after her. I love you.
That, too, is the wrong thing.
A/N: This was incredibly fun to write.
~Mademise Morte, March 28, 2011.