*Rated "pW" for Previous Wielder. Deals with past lives. Based largely on conjecture, historical fact, and previous same-author fanfiction.
Upon arriving at the flat, Elizabeth directly set Dominique to readying Mabel for her afternoon nap. Elizabeth sent herself straight to bed.
False labor, she assured herself, teeth gritted against the pain. A few hours horizontal would stave it off enough. Enough so that she could receive Stretzer later that evening.
She had all but forgotten the priest's cryptic counsel (to break with the Major and spend the evening alone in quiet contemplation--waiting for whatever God would send her to 'direct her path')--despite the potentially dire consequences he had outlined to her only hours before.
In her crowded and frightened mind there was no room for any thought beyond Stretzer, the Witchblade's vision, and her desperate need to win him away from Hedda Germer's quest and to her side--a task she knew would not be simple.
Certainly, Stretzer cared for her--insofar as she continued to please him, continued to make aspects of his life more pleasant rather than less. But her child? The child she had told him was Rolf Germer's? The child was nothing to him. He had told her as much shortly after she had broken the news to him. It had been in March, though she had known of her situation long before.
Stretzer had told her in his nonchalant way that, naturally, if she wished to "lose" the child he knew some names. In the same breath he had also informed her, casually, that he felt no compulsion to direct the situation one way or another as her current amour. Her decision interested him only academically.
And then, he had taken her hand and kissed it in the way that he had--as though she contained some mineral, some vitamin crucial to his existence--as though he could never hope to get enough of her. As though she were something to be consumed, desperately--as bread to the starving, or wine to the parched.
Bronte had protested against the "losing" of the child--not too much (she had not wished him to believe she wanted the child for sentimental reasons regarding Rolf)--and her argument fell back on patriotism.
Had not the Fuehrer himself given more than one moving address to the nation about the importance of family, and German children, and the legacy they would proudly carry?
She professed a passion for patriotism where this inconvenient child was concerned, and Stretzer indulged her, because she pleased him. Because he could see no way in which this child could affect his life--his romance--with Elizabeth Bronte any more than the existence of Mabel did at present. And as of right now, his chief passion was for Elizabeth Bronte.
His other passions were for paperwork, exactness and efficiency. He could hardly have advanced so quickly among the SS had they not been. She knew he would not stand in the way of Hedda Germer, widow of the heroic dead, her husband's ghostly Valhalla-like legacy more influential among his comrades than his physical manifestation would have been. No, Stretzer would have no wish to stand in the way of Hedda Germer and her valuable paperwork. Not unless Bronte could effect such a desire in him.
And she was not likely to be able to effectively do so if should she still be in pain when he arrived for the evening.
.
Lowering herself onto the mattress in her bedroom, she attempted to calm herself, and loosen the spasm pains binding her lower back. There could be a baby tomorrow, she told herself with false cheer. Tomorrow would be a wonderful day for a baby (she lied), but not today. There was too much yet to do.
.
She could not have been lying down for more than fifteen minutes when a loud hubbub of knocking came from the flat's outer door. It was not the sound of a delivery--not the sound of the landlady. It was the sound of hurried impatience. She could translate no more exactly than that.
It took a moment, but she rose from the bed, rolling to her side, knowing there was no reasonable way, without assistance, she could get her shoes on if she meant to answer the knock within the next twenty minutes.
Waddling--she didn't like to think of it, but she knew she did it--down the hallway, past Mabel's room, and waving away Dominique who had left off telling a naptime story to find her and likely offer assistance with her shoes, Bronte found her right fist vise-clenched as though all the pain in her body rested there in that single claw-like gnarl.
Looking down, she saw--and felt--the Witchblade begin to grow and cover the knotted shape into which her fist had morphed. The armor of the Blade rose no higher than the base of her wrist--like a stylish, abbreviated glovelet--but she found that in letting it grow so a great deal of her pain lessened. Discovering this blessing--a heretofore-unknown analgesic--she made no attempt to coax the talisman back into its dormant jewelry state.
"A moment, please!" she threw at the door and its knocker. They have not come for the baby, she told herself. It is too soon. Frau Germer said herself she wished Stretzer to approach me first. They do not know I even know of their meeting. They have not come for the baby.
So concentrated was she on this matter, so filled with convincing herself it was not so, she spared not a moment to consider--as she usually did--the fact that her and Mabel's very lives here were made of little more than a string of well-woven but fallible untruths that at any moment could unravel and expose them with deadly consequences. This was the usual realization that such unexpected knocking prompted. And usually such a realization was generally followed by the appropriate use of caution and suspicion. At this moment, however, not so.
Without asking the knocker's identity, Bronte opened the door, allowing a generous crack of eight inches or so to exist between herself and the knocker.
In the hallway of her building--close to the door at which he had, until half a moment prior been knocking, stood a lone man. His clothes were dusty from travel or neglect, the coat he wore a size too large and patched in several places, his hat frayed and his beard full but shaggy, as was his hair.
All this she saw in a bare instant.
He was far from being an unfamiliar sight on any street in Berlin. The only remarkable thing about him was his age, close to hers--the age at which any healthy German men would already have been pressed into military service--if he had not yet signed up of his own accord.
He wore his hat low, making his eyes and the other features not obscured by his beard difficult to see in sharp focus.
"Guten tag, Frau," he said, his hand extending to her, holding out something she could not quite see in the fading light. "I'm sorry to have followed you home," he apologized, haltingly, "but you dropped this on the street just now. It did not seem like something you would wish to be without."
Elizabeth's eyes followed his to the item he held out to her.
At the sight of it something seemed to snap, like a rubber band over-taut inside her head. It made her eyes flutter, as though irritated from the hallway's ever-present dust motes.
Her left hand (she kept her right, clothed in the Witchblade, out of sight behind the door) accepted what he pressed into it. A soft, silk scarf, hand-sewn. As he had recounted, it did indeed look as though it had been dropped in the street, though more than just the once.
The scene, which had been playing out slowly, as though the Victrola's crank was winding down on the record's last song, took on an unexpected, but certain clearness and alacrity.
She blinked--her eyes were unable to look at the scarf without losing their focus. "Dominique," she called over her shoulder--knowing the girl had followed her to the door. "My pocketbook."
And to the man she said, loud enough for the tenant on the floor below or above to hear; "thank you. I must give you something for your trouble--a reward." She smiled pleasantly, as though he were nothing more than a down-on-his-luck chap who'd brought her something she'd dropped on the street.
His eyes were pinholes of reflected light under the hat's brim, his face slack with easy tranquility--but those eyes remained severe, intent on her own.
She kept the door cracked at eight inches, and handed him two Deutsche marks. "Again," she assured him vocally, as a disinterested frau to an honest tramp. "Thank you." Her voice at an almost inaudible pitch, she added, "two hours."
Without further exchange, he turned and left, and she shut the door to his retreating back, her fingers twined with a silk scarf she had never worn about her neck--much less lost in the street today for some indigent to rescue and claim a reward for returning.
Elizabeth Bronte let out her breath, and the Witchblade relaxed for a moment its hold on her fist; with its momentary retreat, the pain returned. A spasm like a poker-hot knitting needle shot across her abdomen. Reflexively her lungs inhaled, letting out a ragged sound like a man long submerged returning to air. It had been almost ten months since she had last seen the priest John Bellamy.
DISCLAIMERS: Elizabeth Bronte and the Witchblade (and additional characters that will make appearances in other chapters to come) are property of Top Cow and Warner Bros. I mean no disrespect, and am not making any money or profit out of their use here.
Any inaccuracies please chalk up to deliberate anachronism. It's just a happier, more criticism-free world that way.
What happened to Elizabeth Bronte before Possession? Check out Occupation, posted here at fanfiction.net.
Neftzer 2003(c)
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