"I'm no one," Elizabeth protested. She did not want him here. She had enough to think about without adding him back to the mental list from which she had so recently scratched his name. "No one, just some girl who fell on hard times, and got caught up with the wrong crowd." Her voice nearly broke. "That's all," she tried to be convincing. "No one." Her fist flexed within the Blade's gauntlet.
Why did he have to show up again? Why couldn't he just let be? His presence did nothing to calm her, only served to heighten her senses by adding the burden of yet another person to protect. Her nerves and temples flared with danger. She thought what she felt was anger; was surprised to find herself on the brink of tears.
"Shhh. No more lies," he said, his pupils dilated in the darkness. "We've both of us had enough of that. Only truth, now."
"I'm no one," her voice caught in her throat, ruining her attempt to be gruff. She restrained a shiver before it manifested itself. "My name is Bronte. Elizabeth Bronte. My only living child--my daughter, Mabel--is asleep in the next room." Her arm, Witchblade encasing it, came up involuntarily to point the way down the hall. The metal shone and flickered in the moonlit foyer, as if tickled to add itself to the growing catalog of inexplicables this man could list as attached to her life.
"Deception made us as we are," she said, unsure if the, 'we' were the Witchblade and herself, or Connor, or Mabel. Time and identity seemed ready to bleed into one another. "That is all the truth I can tell you," she warned him. "After that? After that is lies."
The atmosphere in the room shifted. The charge of only moments ago mellowed out, forgotten. With her declaration, Bronte moved back to the door, thinking to open it and tell him to go. She had gotten her way from him by a simple, inspiring flash of the gauntlet before--she saw no reason that this situation should differ. In reaching for the door, she had to take a step toward where he stood in the half-darkness, his back nearly against the wall.
As she moved, she felt his hand's touch on the side and back of her neck--and not in an aggressive manner; his fingers and grip kneading into her skin like they required a hold on something more solid than the air about him--which looked unlikely to hold him upright for much longer.
Still, she responded as though he had attacked. The Witchblade moved her forearm laterally against his chest, pinning him to the wall with a dull thud.
"I haven't killed anyone lately," she cautioned him, his fingers still encroaching on her hairline, the touch of his palm cold to her, as foreign as corpse flesh.
His left hand slowly retracted, and she saw small beads of sweat forming at his hairline. His eyes now faraway, their vision distant, he withdrew his hand, resting it on top the elbow joint of the Witchblade still settled across his chest.
"How can a hunk of metal and stone be jealous?" he asked, patting the talisman like an old friend--or worthy nemesis. The whisper of a smile crossed his face, creasing the lines around his mouth, and Bronte was nearly too distracted by his expression to feel when his knees began to buckle.
At the last minute she grabbed him by the shoulders, hoping to hold him in place.
There was no time for this--he had to go now, she thought. "You have to go now," she said, foolishly--there was nothing in his manner that showed he could make it back down the hallway, much less make it away from this place without fainting dead away. And she couldn't very well have that.
"Go," he asked, hazily. "But I already went once, Lass--was that not enough for ya?"
"Where did you go," she asked. "Where have you been, that you could not even take off your shirt and this damned sponge of a sweater to get yourself dry? Had you no thought to taking a chill?"
"I went back," he said, as he slumped slowly down the wall and to the floor, where she held him upright, the Blade retracting in the wake of his collapse, becoming no more than an ornament for her wrist.
"Back to La Belle Aurore," he told her. "Been there for two days solid. Giving you the chance to sell me out." Even in his present condition, he had the obstinacy to wink. "That settled, I came to find you--and the wee Mabel."
"And here I am," Bronte said, knowing she was stuck with him. Knowing she would not send him back out into the night with his chill, with his still-damp sweater and shirt, no matter the ignorance of his actions--returning to the only spot she could have directed the SS to, had she chosen (or had they interrogated her fiercely enough).
He was a fool, waiting in that dangerous way station, the entrance to at least one run of tunnels that could lead the Nazis--if not to the cellar where he had taken her, then, likely to another equally secret Free French hideout. She shook her head in disbelief at the imprudence of his tenacity to disprove her traitor status. Wrongheaded mama's boy. Look at where his actions had gotten him; nearly unconscious on the floor of a known collaborator's hotel suite, soaked through with a chill that might turn on him, if the Gestapo did not stop by to investigate where their man in the lobby had got himself to, first.
Bronte began peeling his sweater off over his head, his arms so heavy with exhaustion, so unwieldy in the process, she thought for a moment she would slice the awkwardly wet knitted wool to get it off him, instead.
"And here you are," the foolish man called Jean said, in belated answer to her, before he swooned away altogether. He did not seem to mind the precariousness of his current circumstances in the least.
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...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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