Elizabeth and Frandrew: SCENES

by Tessaray


#3 Eyes

When Drew closes his eyes now, what appears in his darkened field of vision isn't flashes of memory or echoes of his institutional surroundings. It isn't Kim.

It's Elizabeth's eyes.

Clear and dark as a midnight sky…

Indigo.

The word rises, familiar yet not, like all the other unwelcome words that keep inserting themselves into his brain. Words he knows but would never use.

No, not indigo, he silently growls at the source of the word, the source of all the alien dreams and impulses he's constantly battling to suppress. Her eyes were hard as he lay helpless in that hospital bed. They were resolved. They drilled into him with a determination that still shakes him. She's committed to the mission, will stop at nothing to end him and bring back Franco.

Elizabeth has a warrior's eyes.

He whispers the first two syllables of her name, clamps his mouth shut on the third. He wants to think of her as that nurse, or as Franco's pitiful wife, but she's become fully herself to him now, three-dimensional and compelling…

Elizabeth.

He pushes the name away, finds that he's slouching again. With a hiss, he straightens it up — shoulders back, chin high, fingers instinctively curling around something—

He curses, flails, flings the invisible paintbrush to the floor of the day room and can almost hear the clatter of wood on linoleum. He notices eyes on him then, drawn by his sudden movement — some are rheumy and dim, others are narrowed, suspicious. They belong to people who belong in this place; people unlike him, people out of touch with reality…

The day nurse has looked up from her book and is watching him with open curiosity, so he swallows, stretches his neck, makes a show of rubbing his hand — see, it's nothing, just a cramp… not a violent reaction to the parasite trying to seize control of his body and mind.

When the nurse loses interest in him and returns to her book, he slams his eyes closed, tries to center himself… but there she is again — Elizabeth, leaning too close over his prone body, her breath warm and sweet on his face…

Elizabeth. Determined to control him, cage him, kill him. Not because she hates him…

But because she loves Franco.

He winces, bites down hard on his teeth at this simple, raw truth. That's what really shook him, and shakes him still — not the fear of his own end, but the evidence of his own poverty.

He's never loved or been loved like that. Not even close. And he hadn't realized it until Elizabeth's eyes told him so. The thing he shared with Kim — the thing he called love that had sustained him for years — felt shallow, flimsy and adolescent by comparison.

Elizabeth's love for Franco is a savage force that penetrated him, stripped him bare, left him weak. It almost made him offer himself, sacrifice himself… just like Franco did.

He can understand why Franco did it… but not how. How could he have turned his back on that consuming love, on those formidable eyes?

He blinks, finds that people are stirring around him, rising from their chairs, leaving the day room singly and in hunched pairs. Time for dinner. He's hungry, too… but for something much deeper and more necessary than food.

Elizabeth isn't the only warrior in this fight.

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