*Rated "S2" for Season Two. May contain information in direct conflict with previously well-established mythos.
Danny didn't reply, only held his place behind the bag, while her mind skipped back to earlier that afternoon when she had been wakened from a sound sleep by the sense--the Witchblade's sense--of someone outside on her fire escape.
She had gone to the window, a man's black form starkly visible against the week's generous snowfall. Nottingham.
"What? You don't switch to white stealth gear after Labor Day?" she quipped through the glass. His eyes, as always, were slightly downcast, but she was not foolish enough to think he did not fully see her standing opposite him in the relative warmth of her loft, dressed in little more than boy-leg skivvies and--out of respect for the underlying chill in the weather--a long-sleeved man's Henley she had acquired by default after one break-up or another. She could no longer even say whose it had been.
Sara Pezzini glanced at her wool-stockinged feet, thought maybe he might go away. She stretched a toe, rolled her instep. She could feel--the Witchblade could feel--that he hadn't. Giving in to his silent persistence, she leaned forward and threw up the sash, watching disconcertedly as clumps of wet snow fell into the room from the outer sill. Watching them suspiciously, but not moving, she did nothing about them. Nottingham was inside in a moment, sliding the screen-less window closed with his always gloved hands.
Funny thing was--he never looked cold. Nor, did his boots (only moments ago on the wet, snow-covered grate) seem to have brought any moisture in with them. She shook her head to clear it of such pointless observances.
"Handing out fruit baskets to the 'chosen'?" she joked into the air that lay silent, but portentous, between them.
"I have no gift for you, Sara," he said softly, with the inflection that this was something she should have already known.
As always, unnerved by his presence--thinking that perhaps, inviting him in was not, after all, the best of ideas--she moved into the kitchen, and he was obliged to follow her if he wished to be heard.
"Even Mr. Irons," he spoke his Master's name, as always, with deep reverence, "with his considerable wealth could offer no gift as valuable--as perfect--as that which you already possess."
In response to the compliment, the Witchblade--at that moment vain as a girl being given her first corsage--beamed, its throaty voice sending a satisfied sigh up Sara's spine. Annoyed, Pez 'accidentally' smacked the back of her wrist into the refrigerator door as she reached for the cream cheese.
"So, you've come to sing carols, then," she asked, still trying to puzzle out--as ever--his mission.
"I do know a moving arrangement of 'Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella,' in Flemish," he offered--wildly anachronistic truths the closest he would ever come to jesting. "But I am sent, rather, to deliver this." He extended a golden envelope with her name on its front in intricate scripting that would have done a medieval monk proud.
"What is it," she asked blandly, not accepting it, but leaning against the kitchen counter more than an arms' length from him, crumbs of bagel generously spread with cream cheese catching in the weave of the fire-engine red Henley as she ate.
"An invitation," he replied, the envelope still extended.
"To join him?" she asked. "Again? Didn't he get my 'not interested' RSVP?" She reached out her free hand not to the envelope, but to the pulp-free OJ she had poured into a glass. Had her guest been anyone else she would have told him to toss his coat on the sofa and invited him to join her. As it was, she could not imagine the day would ever come when she would do so, nor he accept.
"It is an invitation to join him--us," his speech stumbled for a moment over the addition, "for Christmas dinner."
"You already know that's an invitation I'll never accept," she told him, sitting the now-empty juice glass in the sink. She had not taken the invitation from his outstretched hand, and showed no inclination of doing do.
"I have been told," he said, referencing the formality of the invitation, the cordialness with which it was sent, "that to a heart, the gesture prove as important as the realized actuality." He wanted very much for her to accept--even if her intent, or her motive in doing so were less than genuine.
"That only goes for people with hearts, Nottingham," she countered, perhaps a bit too sternly. "And we both know that there's no room for those in this equation."
She could not know how she had crushed his hopes. Could not know how he longed for her every visit to Irons' estate--whether the outcome were anger, or battle, or defiance. The right-ness that came from her presence, her participation--whatever Mr. Irons' purpose--whatever hers--mattered not at all. Sara Pezzini was the wielder. And his purpose was for the wielder. That was enough.
Practicing the boldest defiance toward her that he yet had, Nottingham placed the golden envelope between the saltshaker and the adjacent Tobasco bottle on her kitchen table. He was ready to go, as surely as if his Master had dismissed him aloud. He turned and headed back toward the window and its fire escape, though the door and its heated, enclosed stairway lay but a yard from her kitchen.
"What's the matter, Jolly Old St. Nottingham," she threw after him one last mocking remark across the loft's silence, "chimney not good enough for you anymore?"
Without response, he pushed up the sash as he stepped across the threshold, and Sara could have sworn that before he was gone, she saw him lay his black-gloved finger aside of his nose.
DISCLAIMERS: Witchblade the show/comic and its characters 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.
Additionally, the first five paragraphs here are a riff on/homage to the opening of Charles Dickens' short novel A Christmas Carol. I do not own that work (or its characters) either--and do not mean to represent that I do.
This story belongs to Alias Superspy, as my holiday gift to her.
Neftzer 2003(c)
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