He smiled at her, lips curling upward very slightly, folding his arms carefully around her thin—too thin, oh God, was she this thin before?—waist, and feeling her head rest gently on his shoulder.
A contented hum caught in his throat, and he buried his face into her delicate golden mane of hair. "Eliza…" he murmured, whispering sweet nothings into her deaf ears, rich Germanic poetry dripping off of his tongue. Just a few short years ago, she would have giggled delightedly, pushing her flushed face into his neck.
Now she lay silent, too-wide eyes staring sightlessly at one of the hotel room walls.
No matter what he did, or how he tried, she was never able to lose her silent frailty; a woman couldn't be held together, apparently, with just hope and love. Re-created muscles and temporary flesh could only do so much. She was still just a—doll? Never! His Eliza was so much more than just a doll—shadow of her former self—a ghost.
Ghost. When he first saw them, they seemed to be figments of his morphine-afflicted, tormented imagination. The very same imagination that sent him visions of his beloved Eliza to him during sleepless nights… visions where she danced and laughed and sang for him.
Only, the ghosts were real, and she was not. No, no, no, no! She is real! She… I…
I gave her life once before, I can do it again.
A human soul was a fragile thing, he learned. It could be tainted, purified, recalled, lost, manipulated, and gambled away. While he always felt a stab of guilt when he used her—perfect, precious, lovely—soul for less-than-wholesome tasks, he knew that it was for the greater good, and that it would ultimately win him back his Eliza.
I love her. Eliza…She had looked gorgeous in a wedding dress, he recalled. He had snuck into her dressing room before the ceremony, though she had shrieked good-naturedly and warned him it was bad luck. Then, he hadn't believed her. Now, he wondered.
If I had done this… if I hadn't done that… if I had come home just a few minutes earlier…
A natural-born nurse, he remembered how well she had taken to a job in the medical field. She had become every bit as dedicated as he had, telling him smilingly that it had been medicine—and him—you too, Johann—that had saved her life. Patients had loved her, he…
He had loved her more. More than life, more than being a doctor, more than anything and everything that he had ever had, seen, or dreamt about. They were perfect together. Johann and Eliza. There could not be one without the other. He could ignore her silence, drifting off into rich fantasies of how things had once been, replaying old conversations in his mind.
It wasn't easy to ignore the gaping, bullet-shaped hole in her skull.