Strength
Detective Ray Fanning arrived in Indianapolis on a flight straight out of LAX, a red-eye flight that arrived at approximately 8:15 a.m. local time, which was three hours ahead of his Pacific time clock. He rented a car and headed straight for the hospital. He'd called Victoria as soon as his flight had landed, gotten a rather half-dead answer to his question about where she was, and wondered what in the hell he was going to find when he got there.
What he saw didn't really surprise him.
Claudia was fighting. She wasn't letting go, even though all her vital signs were showing she didn't have much of a chance. Victoria met him in the waiting room, eyes totally bloodshot, looking as if she'd slept upright for maybe a few hours, maybe less. Her hair, which she'd streaked with a lighter, cinnamon brown, taking out the darker undertones, was mussed beyond repair.
"What are we going to do?" she asked as he sat down beside her in one of the cheap green chairs.
"You're alone here?"
"Vincent's here. I'm not going to tell you where. I've managed to bribe a nurse in the maternity ward to take care of...my baby." Didn't want to say his name.
"This isn't going to work if you don't trust me."
"I trust you, Ray, with my own life. But not Vincent's."
"I'm not here for Vincent. Vincent had a clean slate. Claudia took up a contract on his life."
"Looks like she got more than she bargained for," Victoria said over a yawn.
"You don't seem too shocked by all this."
"Shock left the building about two hours ago. I'm uncomfortably numb right now."
"So I'll go talk to this lawyer of yours. We'll get things straightened out. Or have you already called her?"
Victoria's eyes were drifting shut. "I didn't," she muttered. "Figured...you'd do it."
"Thanks."
"Ray?" she asked, her voice just a touch clearer than before.
"What?"
"Why are you here? I mean, why didn't you just refer me off to the Fed who should be here...what's his name? Pedrosa?"
"Because I think Claudia worked for Pedrosa," Ray said, nonchalant. "Didn't want to risk it. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. This whole thing will be over with soon."
"That's what worries me," Victoria said, struggling to her feet. "Where will we all be when it is?"
"Like I said, I'm not here for Vincent. Unless he committed a crime. And if Claudia attacked you or him, then it was self-defense and no crime was committed. You're both clear."
"I don't know what the fuck is going on. Only that I helped assist in saving Claudia's life and I have no fucking idea what I was thinking."
Ray smiled up at her. "You're a good person. That's what you were thinking."
"Lot of good it will do me if she lives. She's a ghost. Nothing will stick to her. She'll come at us again."
"You're exhausted. You need to sleep," Ray said, changing the subject.
Victoria's reply was to give him a look that was supposed to be scathing but really came across as someone staring at a person through a half-dead haze, then turned around and disappeared down the hallway.
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Vincent's vitals weren't good. He'd been okay when she'd left him, steady but weak. It had deteriorated.
Victoria entered the room as the morning sun streamed through the windows which faced east. She considering pulling the blinds, but there were a few trees blocking the way and they provided enough shade to keep it from being blinding. She pulled the chair closer to his bedside, noticed that in the few hours he'd been here, his hair had already started to cover his chin, coming back in a dull gray, darkened a little by the dye, but still distinct, still as she remembered it.
She ran the insides of her fingers against the stubble, and smiled to herself. So many times she had felt that roughness, in places she would still blush to remember.
He stirred. His head turned to her a little, his eyes opened. As long as he was awake, it was good. But he was drifting in and out, and it was bad.
"Hey," he said, a little more clearly than before.
She ran her fingers gently through his hair and smiled down at him. A small dread began to eat at her gut, telling her that he was going to ask about Claudia, want to know if she was dead, and if she wasn't, he was going to want to know why not, and she would tell him, because his compulsive honesty was infectious, especially the way he was looking at her now, so adoringly. She'd only caught glimpses of the way he gazed at her at this moment, stolen from the past when she looked at him too fast or caught him off his guard. Which wasn't often. She'd always known he'd loved her. Hearing him say it, what was it, a year ago? Maybe a little more? And then again, from this very bed...
"You know," she said, her voice a husky murmur, "it's really not fair."
"What's not fair?" he whispered.
"You being such an irresistible sick person. How can I be pissed at you when you look so pathetic?"
He gave that breathy chuckle again. It wasn't much stronger than before. "Florence... Nightengale."
"I don't think so. You're not my patient."
"Then...what am I?"
She gazed down at him. "I don't know."
He looked back up at her, and then, to her surprise, he lifted his arm.
"Come here."
"What?" she asked, backing away as his arm lifted higher.
"On the bed. Lie with me."
Victoria looked at his chest, at the bandages. She looked over her shoulder at the passing staff. What he wanted...it was ridiculous.
"You're not strong enough, Vincent," she protested.
"Come on. Humor me."
She stood up, knowing it was stupid, what he wanted. She could step on a tube, she could press to hard on a stitch, cause bleeding. She went to the door, pushed it closed, and then came back to the bed. He had lowered his arm, unable to hold it up. Then, with a strength that astounded her, he shifted over, giving her room on the bed.
"Are you nuts?" she hissed, reaching out to make him hold still.
"Come on," he said, tugging at her shirt. "Please."
Gently, so gently, holding herself half-off the bed, she lay down beside him. His arm, the one he was using to bring her closer, seemed to be where all his strength resided, as it was the least damaged part of his body, with only a few slash marks down the back. He got it around her shoulders and pulled her head close to his chest, resting five inches above where Claudia had stabbed him. He pressed his face into her hair, resting there, practically pinning her in place just as effectively as handcuffs and rope. She didn't dare move for fear of hurting him.
His lips pressed against her forehead. A few locks of her hair had fallen against his nose and he inhaled as deeply as he could.
"I need a shower," she muttered, slightly embarrassed.
"You...smell fine." His strength was gone. "I love you."
That was the second time he'd said it in twenty four hours. It was starting to alarm her. "Vincent, you realize you've told me that twice as many times in the few hours we've seen each other than in the three months we spent together?"
"Mistake," he said. "I love you...so much."
Her heart wrenched. "Vincent...stop talking like you're dying."
"I am dying."
The words stopped her heart. "You're not. You're going to be fine."
"No. I'll never...be fine. I haven't been...fine...since we met."
She frowned. "Not fair to blame me," she muttered, hating herself for it.
"Not blaming," he said, and she felt him smile against her skin. "Thanking."
"Vincent," she said, her voice a bit louder. "Stop it."
"Can't." His fingers weakly squeezed her shoulder. "Want you to know. I'm so...happy. When I'm with you."
She lifted her head, unable to worry about how the movement might jar him. He was looking at her, his eyes so large, so set. She looked down into his face, searching for something, anything she could grasp.
"Then stay with me," she said.
"Stay?"
"With me. Don't die. Stay with me. Be my husband. Be a father to our child." She gripped the edge of the shirt that covered him, applying only the slightest pressure, but he felt it. "If you love me, you won't die."
"You realize...you're better off...without me."
"Oh, yeah, I'm like a lottery winner," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "You can't die, Vincent. I'll never forgive you if you die."
"Not being fair," he said, closing his eyes. "You're...trying to...manipulate me."
"I'm a woman. That's my nature."
"And mine...isn't..."
"It is, if you let it. You protected us both, you brought Charles to me. You could learn. You know, my father always said that the best thing a father could ever do for his children is love their mother. You say you love me. You can be a father to my baby."
He flinched, turned his head away. She worried it was an emotional reaction for a second, and then remembered the terrible strain this conversation was probably causing. She pushed herself up, touching as little of him as possible.
"Vincent," she said, leaning down close to his ear, "please...don't leave. I love you too, don't you know that? Haven't I ever said it?"
"You've...said it...very clearly."
"Not with words."
"No. Better." He turned to her, and lifted his head, pressing a kiss to the corner of her mouth. She responded, closing her eyes, giving him access to the fullness of her lips, but his strength was gone, and he lay back down, unconscious again.
She extracted herself from beside him. It was time to go check on Charles.
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Fanning was only human. He remembered clearly how she'd used him and then betrayed him, left him to rot in the trunk of that car. On more rational occasions, he knew that she would have had to come back for him eventually, but what in the hell she'd been planning for that, he couldn't fathom. What did you do with a man you'd hogtied and imprisoned? You certainly didn't just cut him loose and expect everything to go on as normal.
When his anger rose up like this, he found himself thinking of how he could avenge himself and his wounded pride. But those times were few and far between.
Unfortunately, standing over her death bed, watching the monitors tell him how hard she was fighting to stay alive, he found himself having one right at that moment.
It would be easy to kill her, he thought as he looked at her. Just pull out a tube, the one bringing air to her lungs. But then, if she didn't die fast enough, the hospital would be alerted, there would be attempts to revive her, and then he could possibly get caught, and his ass was already too close to getting fired. He wasn't even supposed to be here, really. He'd jumped the chain of command. Why in the hell had he done that?
Was it for Victoria?
Or was it for Vincent?
Somehow, he couldn't help but admire the man. In a sick, twisted, backward way, there was really something to admire. He was always in control of any situation, no matter how crazy. He'd managed to evade everything and everyone - even on his meat-eating rampage through Los Angeles, he'd kept people from even realizing he existed. He was a walking, talking ghost.
It had to take a remarkable person to be like that.
And then there was Victoria. Ray had tried to date her, but it hadn't worked. She was too wounded, too emotionally unavailable. That she would do what she had done with her life for this man...there had to be something there. There had to be. Victoria wasn't a stupid person. She was very smart, although in her youth she had been careless. She wasn't careless anymore.
Fanning watched the beep, beep, beep. He detected, or maybe just hoped, that it was getting weaker, fewer and farther between. Maybe by lunch, she wouldn't be pushing as hard to live. The human body could only take so much, and Vincent had shattered her. Ribs puncturing her lungs, all the bones in her hands and feed broken, a fracture in her skull they'd barely managed to keep from killing her, and then there was the damage done to her organs - methodical damage, penetrating just deep enough to be...
He blinked.
Vincent had wanted her to die slow. He'd known what he was doing. Sure, she would fight. But the damage would get her in the end. It was a slow, painful death.
Ray shuddered. There was something to admire. But he was still a scary son of a bitch.
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People in stages of anxiety and distress have strange dreams. Dreams, if you're a Freudian, have significance, and if you aren't, they still have significance. They don't interpret the future or tell you your past. They simply give you what is inside your own head.
Charles was awake when she reached him, and she took him in his carrier down to Vincent's room. She didn't have to be on shift for a solid eight hours, maybe more, considering the circumstances, and she wasn't going to leave Vincent's bedside until she was sure he was going to live.
Her brain replayed her conversation with him as she watched the monitors beep out his vitals. She'd told him that if he loved her, he would live. Why had she done that? It wasn't that she wanted him to die, the thought of his death was actually unbearable. But she wanted, more than anything in the world, to keep her conscience clean.
This last year, she'd managed to accomplish it. She'd never realized how dark her life had been before she'd done it, but now she couldn't bear to give up the light. She was back, doing what she was born to do. Like her instinct to help Claudia, in spite of the fact that the woman had shot her nanny and tried to kill Vincent, probably in an attempt to kill her. She just didn't want to go back to running and hiding, be outside the law. It was a bleak country she didn't wish to revisit.
And if Vincent lived, if he stayed with her, if he married her and was a father to Charles...would he be able to do it?
In the beginning, right around the time Charles was born, she would have a reoccurring dream about him. He would come to her home, wherever she was living, and tell her that he was back, that they could be together. And every time, she told him to go away.
It was usually in a kitchen. She was preparing dinner, doing domesticated things. The house was decorated sometimes, like Christmas, Thanksgiving...dreams were fragmented, surrealistic things. And she dreamed in color. She heard that some people dreamed in black and white, but she always dreamed in color.
"I love you, Victoria," he would say. "I want to be with you. I want us to start over."
And she would say, "How? How are we supposed to start over, Vincent? Things aren't like they used to be. I have a baby now."
Sometimes Charles would be there in the room, sometimes he was in his own room, sometimes he was crying in the background, adding tension to the dream because she knew she had to go to him, but couldn't, because she second she left the room, she knew Vincent would disappear, and she was compelled, irresistibly, to tell him the whole truth.
"I love that boy more than anything in the world," she would say, sometimes with him in her face, sometimes with his back to her, across the room. "I won't do anything to hurt him. There isn't anything in the world I would choose before him. He means more than you, more than us."
Vincent reacted the same each time. With the sort of stunned indifference that she imagined came upon his face after he killed someone. Or maybe it was the look he'd had on his face that day with Max, when Max had called him out, made him face uncomfortable truths he didn't want to see.
"Can you accept him, Vincent? Can you be a father to him? Can you put him first? Because if you can't, you need to leave, and don't come back. Don't ever come back."
She would always wake up from that dream with her heart racing and her eyes aching, as if she wanted to cry, but lacked the real tears.
It was true, she knew, as she sat there beside Vincent's bed, blinds now drawn to keep out the afternoon sky, which was simply too bright blue and cheerful for her present mood. Charles was everything - the sun and the moon, the stars, life, breath, everything. She would do nothing, absolutely nothing, without putting him first.
The fierceness of her love forced some adrenaline through her body, causing her fingers to clench the sides of the chair. Charles seemed to sense her change, and started to fuss. She pulled him out of his carrier and into her lap, where he played with tufts of her hair, the collar of her shirt, the buttons that sparkled at him. He smiled at her when she made fake sneezed into his face, loving the "choo!" sound. She held him close, watched Vincent's breathing as it grew stronger, steadier in his bed. His sleep was less fitful, the constant shifting from consciousness to waking finally passing.
He was getting stronger. He was going to live.
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Dreams were such funny things.
She always dreamed in two perspectives - she was in her dreams, and she was watching them from outside.
With Charles in his carrier, chewing happily on his teething rings, she had drifted off.
She was in a house. It was a huge, beautiful, grand house. It reminded her of an extremely fancy restaurant, in a way - one of those elegant old mansions that was converted for public service. It would switch, back and forth.
It was round, and furnished entirely in deep cherry wood, and some kind of yellow cloth. Everything was covered in the yellow cloth, which had some kind of writing on it - it looked like Chinese writing, Kanji. It was a beautiful, golden yellow, on a material that was strong and smooth, yet soft. All the furniture was upholstered with it, and the floor was either carpeted in an identical color, or paved with it. Even the walls were papered with it. The dark cherry and golden yellow together struck her as very elegant, very tasteful, although as she moved from room to room, she found it more and more odd that the same theme should run through the entire house. She knew that most people liked to vary things from room to room.
The rooms seemed to surround a huge staircase, which led up to a bright place she couldn't see. She didn't ever find the bottom of the staircase, because as she came around the curve, back to where she had started, it was a restaurant again, filled with people, eating high piles of rich Italian food.
She was aware that she was supposed to meet someone here. As she walked past tables, memories flashed by her like scenes from a familiar movie, and she couldn't place them. She was supposed to meet someone, and she was late.
Now she was watching herself - her dream version of herself - run through the front door and into the restaurant, going to meet whoever she was late to meet.
The guy had his back to her, his arms stretched out and around two women, both beautiful, loose, cheap. As she walked closer, something wizzed past her - a guy on a scooter? - and reached the man first. He said something to him.
The guy lifted his head. It was Vincent. Or at least, it looked like Vincent, but he was much younger, and his hair was long, like it had been when she'd seen him for the first time in a year. Long and brown.
Immediately, she understood what was going on. In dreams, there is a set of knowledge you enter with, the rules, the plot. She was late for a date with this man. And he, in despair, had given up her arriving, and decided to throw himself to whoever would have him. Being charming, being handsome, naturally he had many takers. But now, seeing her, he extracted himself as if he'd never wanted to touch them, and came up to her.
She didn't understand why he wanted her. She was so plain. The women he'd been with were glamorous, beautiful. But sure enough, he was with her, and she was apologizing for being late, and he looked guilty and relieved at the same time.
He'd wanted her to come. He had wanted her there so much. He'd gone through all this trouble, and had been so upset when he thought he'd been stood up. She had no heart to be jealous of those women, or even remotely angry at him. So they sat down, and started to talk.
She heard murmuring. Victoria lifted up her head, her eyes opening.
Vincent was propped up slightly in his bed, his color better, his good arm moving. A nurse had come in, and had taken Charles from his carrier, sitting him on the bed beside his father, holding him up.
"He's adorable," the nurse was saying in a soft voice, her hand smoothing the wispy dark hair on his head. Charles was cooing contentedly, giggling as Vincent's fingers slipped in and out of his grasp. Vincent was looking at Charles with a sort of guarded wonder, but there was something in his face, a pleasure she'd never seen before.
Vincent looked over at her, and he smiled.
A/N: Okay, what's going on? Only 4 reviews for CHapter 15? But that was a majorly important chapter! (SIGHS HEAVILY) Okay, I understand, you have lives. I know. But come on guys, before you know it, this will all be over! I have one, MAYBE two chapters left to go before we leave Vincent and Victoria to whatever fate fanfiction leaves them. However, there are those of you who've been loyal and constant. And even if you haven't reviewed Ch. 15 yet I know you will when you can, so in the meantime:
Warm Mittens: Yeah, I did the math, too, it's like 6.5 reviews for each chapter. Although Sweet Treats reviews are getting us up there.
Sweet Treats: Although, ST, you need to review the STORY. Go back and READ. Heh. I'm just playing with you. But what I can say, you're 14. Man, I remember when I was 14. Or are you 15? I can't remember. Guess I'm really getting old. I'm like twice your age. I was only beginning to write when I was 14, just starting to play with the whole idea and realizing that I liked it. I wrote stories about magical horses. Seriously. THat's what kind of a dweeb I was.
LunaGrrrBack023: Dont' worry, I know you're out there. And as for Claudia being brought to justice...well, depends on your definition of justice, doesn't it? Heh heh...
Byrony Cel: I love your reviews: Good job, next chapter please! That is so direct. I love it. Although I loved your review for Ch. 14, about how you'd wait if those were the results. That's really nice of you to say, considering I plunked out that chapter in one night, until a very late time, and was tardy for school the next day. Actually, I wasn't tardy, I was about 10 minutes later than my usual time, but I'm such an anal wench sometimes...but it was worth it. As you saw from this chapter, Claudia really got her ass handed to her. Wicked, wicked Vincent...
SweetArwen: How about this? Stop me if you've heard this one...one character is in love with another character, and they get together temporarily, but the first character realizes that the second character doesn't really love her, and that she must leave, and then the second character either chases after the first one and convinced her that he does love her, OR the first character tells the second one to go take a flying leap, or the second character just sort of goes on, and the first character is left to deal with the angst and broken heart alone, but manages. I love melancholy stuff like that. I love a story that can super depress me in just the right way. I'm so funny that way. You see Jerry McGuire? If you haven't, stop reading now, but if you have, if I had been Renee Zelweggers character, I would not have taken Tom Cruise back. Throughout the entire movie, I'm thinkig, yeah, she loves you, totally, but not only do you not love her Cruise, but you don't even deserve her. I totally didn't buy them getting back together in the end. He really needed to "earn" her back. It was just too neat for me. GIVE ME MORE ANGST! LOL...
firegoddess164: Actually, I must say in Claudia's defense, that she didn't actually make any attempt on
Charles, not directly. Sure, she shot the nanny, but she never harmed Charles himself. Sure, Vincent was
there, but knowing Claudia, she probably knew Vincent would take care of things. Besides, I really don't
think Claudai was trying to kill Cindy (the nanny) because if she had been trying to kill her, she would
have killed her. She was just trying to screw her up. Anyway, that's okay, you go ahead and get mad,
that means the story is affecting you. As you saw from my little note to SweetArwen above, I love stories
that make people emotional, even me. Angry, sad, depressed, happy, all is one when it comes to being
moved by a story.
Okay, is that all? Let me know if I missed anything. See you guys sometime this week with the final installments!
AND REMEMBER TO REVIEW!!!