They came to the end of the catacombs inside an abandoned shop, their tunnel-run completed. La Belle Aurore was still readable on the half-shattered front window facing the street. What few chairs were left were broken and overturned, dust settling heavy all around. Once-shattered glass (from drinking vessels and windows) had been broken so long most had been ground down (from heavily-booted footsteps) to near-dust itself.
The odd checked curtain, still hanging from the odd curtain rod still attached to its wall supports, caused any natural light to be scattershot at best, making it difficult for Bronte to tell what time of day it might be--only that it was not night.
Jean (now known as Connor) paused to look and see whether they would be noticed upon their exit onto the side street the café fronted. While he did this, Bronte found a moment to adjust her bunching stockings after their journey from the cellar.
"Wait," she directed--more than asked--him, realizing her stockings had torn free of the garters holding them in place. This realization of her potentially disheveled self also brought to mind that her hair had not been straightened, combed, or looked-after since well before the explosion. There was no way she could step out onto the street looking like she'd gone through, well, everything she'd gone through. It simply wouldn't wash. They would be stopped, they would be questioned. They would be detained.
Connor paused at her demand, throwing a look over his shoulder from where he was scouting any activity surrounding their position, and she moved to the counter where a stray piece of mirrorized glass had caught her eye from where it lay broken, but still useful.
She unceremoniously lifted the floor-length skirt of her evening gown (there was no time for modesty) to mid-thigh-level, wishing the Witchblade could be coaxed into repairing the nylon and metal contraption of her garter belt.
It was cold enough in the gown she was still wearing--and the nylons went a long way to keep her legs warm--but they had ripped irreparably out of their pinnings (there was simply nothing left of their tops to hook into the garter belt's buckles), and there was nothing to do now but strip the stockings off in favor of better mobility, as they had fallen into bunches at her ankles and, in the Father's borrowed jackboots, she was tripping on them with each step.
She knew his eyes were on her as she stripped the torn nylons (all but shredded from her recent activities) off her legs, and stuffed the stockings into each of the toe of the oversized boots.
She could feel the abandoned café wanting to swirl around her until it faded into vision. She struggled to hold it at bay, to keep her hold on the now. Even so, intuition and a memory that was both hers, and not hers at the same time, reminded her that this would not be the first time she had dressed--nor undressed--in front of this man.
"Come back to bed," she heard a voice plead from the edge of the vision, beyond what she could see of another room, another mirror, another time.
In response to the request she felt her own face contract--against her will--into a broad smile. A true, bright, grinning smile she had not worn since before the war. Before ten-hundred-thousand necessarily convincing (but insincere) smiles.
La Belle Aurore, dust, checkered curtains, Bronte chanted to herself, in a desperate effort to center back on the now. This was no time to be having a vision.
"You're in me thrall," the voice coaxed.
She didn't want to see, but there it was, another place, another time, another--him. Wound in bedsheets, shirtless and sleeping (though midday sunlight streamed through nearby windows), tattoos encircling his upper arms. In the vision she reached to touch one, not meaning to wake him.
As her finger came to rest, ever so lightly, on the Celtic bands emblazoned on his flesh, a shift occurred, like an hourglass run out and inverted for the next hour's tracking. Noises for which she had no point of reference assaulted her; beeps and whirrs, a sound like bellows on a dying fire. Jean/Connor was still abed, but there was no cheerful sunlight here. For all that she did not know this place, could not name the pipes and hoses and tubing that seemed to be growing from him like a new breed of plants, springing from his body, she knew. Hospital, she thought,
.
Back in the now (back inside this vessel, Elizabeth Bronte), her hands were grabbing and tugging (not very successfully) at her hair. She had pulled out what of her hair had remained in her expensive, long-forgotten New Year's Eve coif. She tried to smooth it, with only her hands as combs, and her only reference point the shard of glass. It was a mess.
Like so many other times, she swallowed the vision like a child downing butter beans at an adult's insistence, hoping to better decipher it at a later time, when she could afford the luxury of introspection.
"Your back," he spoke, an edge of surprise to his voice. "What have you done to it?"
She was actually able to smile, if somewhat grimly, the emotion perhaps left over from the early part of the vision.
A choice of levity, she hoped, would keep him to his side of the room. "Oh, nothing. Just some mick pretending to be Free French jammed me up against a brick wall."
She went back to the problem of her hair.
He left his post at the window to cross the room. She did not turn around.
Her back was to him, and the shard of mirror was too small to reflect his actions, but when he reached her, she felt his free hand reach out and float lightly over the myriad scrapes across her bare, injured shoulder blades and backbone. She tried, and nearly succeeded, but could not hold back a slight shiver. His touch, unbidden and unnecessary, both stung and comforted. He did not apologize, not for this, nor for the original injury.
It was as though he was looking at her for the first time since the explosion. "Your dress," he noticed, his fingertips migrating to her now-precariously worn shoulder straps, "it's fallin' off ya."
He was not wrong. The fashionable silk with which it was made was not meant to withstand hard use--and neither was the delicate stitching holding the seams of the gown together. Her skin peeked through in more than one place where the thread had already given way, where hooks and eyes no longer held.
"Stop," she said, anticipating his hand hovering above her left hip, ready to touch the three and a half inches of ripped seam to be found there.
She had a very different kind of vision at that moment. One that was not at all supernatural in origin, one where she could feel his warm, curious hand slide through the tear, between silk and skin. Stop, she told herself this time.
The Witchblade, amused, winked at her. Had it been a cat she would have been tempted to kick it for playing its capricious game with her: one minute he's an enemy, the next a conquest, the next? She could hardly speculate.
Bronte found her fingers were too cold to do her bidding where her hair was concerned. Aloud she announced, "I just have to be uninteresting enough so that no one bothers to take a second look at me--at us."
"Here," he offered, busying his troublesome hands with setting down his machine gun, and removing his beret for her own use.
She fixed the wool cap onto her unkempt hair. Problem solved.
"Have this, too," he suggested, pulling his arms out of his leather coat, and settling it around her shoulders, as though it were a fur and they were on their way to the opera.
"What will you do?" she asked, turning to see him left only in his large woolen sweater.
He ignored her question and avoided any comment on her revised appearance. Instead, he took up his gun and stashed it in an old press behind the counter, where he swapped it for a large black bumbershoot, and directed them out onto the street.
"What day is it?" she remembered to ask, having no idea how much time had passed since she had been in captivity.
"Why, it's New Year's Day," he answered. "Nineteen forty-two."
As they set off in the rain, she could not believe how much had come to pass in the space of a single night, for all that that night had spanned from one year into the next.
She thought of Ginger Rogers' character in Bachelor Mother from what she now knew was just the night before. That woman's New Year's was spent in a borrowed hat and coat as well--but hers, rather, a luxurious fur, with a giant corsage, spending a New Year's so bright she hadn't seemed to even notice the cold, her problems nothing more than a wispy construct of the screwball farce, easily fallen into, and easily solved in the last moments of the final reel.
A final reel that never got a chance to play the night before. And a building of revelers--her lover among them--crushed and broken like the brick that buried them. Rolf's nose, broken now. All broken, everything broken, save the code she had been sent here to decipher. Her ties to the SS, all broken. Her mission: busted. Her cover, still in tact, but teetering closer to being exposed every moment she spent with this man beside her, and the compulsions he inspired in her--in the Blade.
There had been no kiss from Rolf, no goodbye on the cheek, no tangle of lips at the strike of twelve. Broken. And she had no time to dissect the way she felt about that.
Happy 1942, Elizabeth Bronte wished herself hollowly, the ancient bumbershoot her kidnapper held pockmarked with threadbare spots, letting in as much of the downpour as it managed to keep away.
.
...to be continued...
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Disclaimer: I do not own Witchblade, nor the rights to its characters. Seek out Warner Bros. and/or Top Cow if you want to talk to people that matter. I'm not in their employ, and I'm not making any money off of their creation. But I am having a good time with it. ;)
by: Neftzer (c)2003
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