"Well, the first thing I shall write in my personal grimoire will be 'All words are magic words.' It may take me some time to get any further than that. I doubt I can rely on always having the perfect poem or story in mind—or on a foe holding still long enough for me to recite it at them. I shall have to come up with a simpler formula." I remarked to Victor, as the door shut behind our guest. "The soles of my shoes are actually melted, see?"
"You have a lifetime in which to achieve it." Victor reassured me. "You may well end up redefining what magic is—certainly you will prove a sorcerer in the true sense of the word—one who goes to the source of magic, and creates new workings. Spellmakers are few and far between. The title of Sorcerer Supreme merely goes to the most powerful and skilled sorcerer of the age. None of the Vishanti were Sorcerers Supreme, in their mortal days—what they were was spellmakers, innovators… I am struck by how well and harmoniously our strengths complement one another. We truly will end up ruling the world."
I was glad to hear him say that, as I had been concerned about Victor's competitive streak. A spouse ought to be a partner, not a rival, after all. But his tone of voice suggested that even if I did wind up becoming a more notable mage than he, it would be fine with him.
"I've been wondering why you gave up ruling the world when you used the Purple Man's power to get it. Janet said you essentially gave it back."
"The reason for that is simple." Victor explained. "It was an empty victory, in the end. The world did not obey me out of choice, but by compulsion, even if it was the gentlest sort of compulsion. I ruled a world of slaves, and my success left a foul taste in my mouth."
"It must have been like being weightless." I said, after I thought for a moment. "Without the resistance of gravity, muscles atrophy and bones become fragile. With no one to oppose you, it would be easy to lose your edge. Not to mention that it must have been pretty boring."
"To be quite honest with you," he admitted, "it was unspeakably dull."
That made me laugh. When I stopped, I asked him, "I am real, aren't I?"
"Are you real? What can you mean by that?"
"You didn't set out to create yourself a companion, and decided to make a tall, dark-haired girl with a healthy libido, a high IQ, and a side serving of art and literature, the result being me? We're so good together, it hardly seems like this can possibly be random."
"No." he said, soberly. "You are real. Even if you were end result of a great deal of genetic engineering and careful conditioning and programming, I could not have done so good a job. I would have left out too many essentials—your wild originality of thought, your propensity to surprise—I might have left out the sense of humor entirely, which would have been a grievous mistake. I had few preconceived notions of what the woman I would marry would be like. I certainly did not anticipate you."
"You know," I said. "That statement, combined with how I felt at dinner when I realized you are proud of me—proud of my wits and my intelligence—only reinforces my plan to try my best to make you feel even half as good. I want to try to talk about what is bothering me—why I am afraid of having children. You deserve no less than the truth from me.
"I'm going to go upstairs and get clean, because my hair and my clothes smell of brimstone. Then I'm going to get into a selection from the things I bought today, put on a sleep mask and get into bed. If you will join me then, and hold me, I think it will be all right."
"Then I will." he told me.
Shower gel and shampoo took care of the stink of Hell, and I towel-dried my hair while I went through my purchases, which Ulrike had already packed for our return to Latveria. I got into a new nightgown—making sure I brushed my teeth first—put on a sleep mask, and turned the lights down to dim.
A few minutes later I heard his tread, and he lay down beside me.
"Are you certain you want to talk about this now?" he asked. "There will be other times."
"No. But that I can talk about it means that it's time I did. Then you can make me feel better afterwards…I have to begin at the beginning, with how I ruined her life before I was even born…"
It was very reassuring to lie there in what was, for me, total darkness, with the warmth and strength of Victor's body at my back. His arm was still around my waist. I could tell him this. I could…
"When she was seventeen, my mother must have been happy. She was going to graduate high school at the top of her class, she had a college scholarship—she was going to study art—her parents were very proud of her, and she had a real boyfriend for the first time. Not a kid—a man. My father. He was twenty-three.
"He was a mechanic, and a very good one. There wasn't enough money to send him to college, and his grades were good but not outstanding. He was a good draftsman. My grandmother had kept renderings he did. Perhaps he might have become an architect, but it just wasn't going to happen. He was a normal, ordinary kind of guy for the sort of town we lived in. He liked hunting and fishing, bowling, beer—and his motorcycle. One February night he when he was riding home, he hit a patch of ice, and his bike hit the side of the Madison Street Bridge. He hit the creek bed below. He died almost instantly.
"I like to think he would have married my mother had he known she was pregnant. I was born in October. By that time, she had been forced to drop out of school, to give up her scholarship, and move out of her parents' house. Her family hadn't quite disowned her, but they made things very hard for her. My hometown was stuck in a time warp—the values and mores of the fifties were alive and well there, twenty-five years ago.
"My father's mother took her in. She was a mine widow—my grandfather was killed in a shaft collapse. My father was her only child. I was—if I was her son's child—the only grandchild she would ever have, so she looked after my mother on that account. Fortunately, I took after him, except for my skin-tone and my hair.
"My mother was almost pathetically grateful at first, but my Grammie was as bossy as she was good-hearted. She criticized what my mother ate, how late she stayed up, and she wouldn't let her smoke, because my mother was pregnant. By the time I was born the tension in the house must have been ferocious…
"My grandmother wanted to adopt me, but my mother refused. A few months after I was born, she took off. Years later, my mother told me it was because, according to my grandmother, she couldn't do anything right, from holding me to sweeping a floor or even stirring a pot of soup. As I said, my grandmother had standards. She was a good woman, but she wasn't always gently spoken. She might have crowded my mother out when it came to me—which was what my mother always said—or she might have stepped in because my mother was too immature to take care of me properly.
"I can only tell you this: from what I know of my mother, if my mother had of necessity been forced to take care of me all on her own, it is very likely that she would have left the infant me in a closed and locked car some summer day, in the full sun, or put the infant me in the bathtub, and gone to get fresh towels, but been distracted by the phone ringing, and talked a good twenty minutes, only to remember me when she hung up. My mother was not a together person. She was…scattered. In a way, it was an act of love on her part to leave me with my grandmother.
"For the first seven years of my life, I only saw her occasionally. She would drop in every few months, for my birthday, for Christmas or Easter—I remember that she would always bring presents, lots of presents— random dime store purchases. She was like a magpie, and bought whatever caught her eye—a copper spoon rest, a sparkly purple candleholder, a pack of plastic barrettes. I don't know what she did during those seven years. She might have lived as cleanly and soberly as a nun. She might have been using drugs and been promiscuous. I doubt she had any full-time job for very long."
"From what you tell me of her, I might almost be moved to sympathy for her—had I not read the police account of what she did to you that precipitated that restraining order." Victor's chest rumbled when he spoke.
"You know, then? How silly, of course you do."
"Yes. How is it that she escaped incarceration—or commitment to a mental institution?"
"Since I wasn't dead, her family—her mother and her brothers—got a lawyer, who worked on the authorities—and on me—until he talked us into a deal. If the charges were dropped, he would agree to undergo psychiatric evaluation, and undergo whatever treatment the doctor deemed necessary. They put pressure on me to go along with it—but I insisted on the restraining order until I got it."
"What was your mother's diagnosis?"
" Depression. Temporary insanity, brought on by my incipient departure. He wrote her a prescription for Prozac and sent her home."
"He was an idiot." Victor bit out.
"I don't know about that. My mother wasn't stupid. Whatever was wrong with her, she could suppress it under pressure. She was extremely good at acting normal when she had to—it was every day life that she couldn't handle. But that comes thirteen years after what I'm telling you about.
"When I was seven, she came back for me. She was getting married to a well-to-do widower with a daughter a few years older than I was. He was a cold man. His daughter was getting ready to hit her teen years and he didn't want to have to deal with the drama, so he remarried a pretty young woman—my mother—who came with baggage—me.
"I didn't want to go and live with them. I wanted to stay with my grandmother. I didn't like the food at my stepfather's, or the unfamiliar bed, or my new sister. I wanted my Grammie, and her good cooking, my own bed, and Pickles, my grandmother's cat. My grandmother did a lot of her own canning, and one summer day when I was four or five, this bone-thin kitten just walked in the back door, bold as you please. She was grey, with a white bib and paws, and her eyes were as green as the pickles we were making, so that was what we called her. I still remember how sharp her bones were, under her fur, when I petted her, that first day, and how her little tummy was round as a tennis ball and tight as a drum after my grandmother got done feeding her a whole can of tuna—and how she purred." I could feel a lump rising in my throat, and for the first time, my tears spilled out.
"For the cat?" asked Victor, puzzled.
"I loved her, and she loved me, she trusted me—she was still alive when my grandmother died, and my mother moved us into her house. The first thing my mother did was to put her in a box, and drive off to the pound. She couldn't stand cats. By the time I worked up enough courage to go to the neighbor who had looked after Pickles while Grammie was in the hospital, and ask him if he'd rescue her—she'd been put to sleep. I let her down—she loved me and she trusted me, and I let her down!" I began to cry in earnest then, great wracking sobs. The mask soaked up the mess.
"It's all right." Victor soothed. "It was not your fault. It was not your doing. You were but fifteen. You did what you could." He held me while I cried.
"I'm sorry." I said, when I finally could. "She was an old cat, she would have died in a few years, any way, it's foolish of me to cry like this over an animal that has been ashes for ten years, now, but…"
"Our relationships with animals, as opposed to those with most people, are uncomplicated by conflicts and negativity. Their devotion and love is pure and unconditional. Why should we be unmoved by their passing?" He brushed my cheek with his fingers. "Do you need a glass of water?" he asked, less rhetorically.
"Please." He got it for me. I sat up, and held out my hand. He put the glass in it, and I drank. "Thank you. You're very, very good to me. I don't know how or why you came to care about me so much. I'm—I'm nothing."
"You—are not—nothing!" he said savagely. "That is not Joviana Von Doom speaking—that is the voice of your mother, or some other, speaking through you. You yourself know this, deep down. You, who can twice beard Hell and live to tell the tale, are not nothing. You, who can so easily outwit and outthink the best of those Magneto has by him, are not nothing. The only creature on the face of this earth who cared enough for me to follow me beyond life, who risked her very soul for me, is not nothing. Put that away and be yourself once more."
I laughed through my tears. "If you say so. It's—hard to banish completely."
"Nevertheless, do it. What of your life with your stepfather and stepsister?"
"There's not much to tell, really. She and I were too different in age to become real friends, he commuted over an hour and a half to work every day, morning and night. I never really knew them. They certainly never knew me. But my mother—that was a different story.
"It was around the time that she married him and I moved in that she started to become a little strange. Whatever was wrong with her began to leak out around the edges. She did things, now and then—get into an argument in the supermarket with someone who picked up an item she was reaching for, or turn up for a social event with her hair all messy, as if she hadn't noticed she hadn't combed it. My step-father could afford a housekeeper, or things might have been worse. She wasn't a good cook, and she wasn't very good at housework.
"But it wasn't so bad. I got to spend the weekends during the school year with my grandmother, andwe went to the lake in the summertime. That was where I met Janet Van Dyne, we were summer friends…
"Then something significant happened. My stepsister turned eighteen and went off to college. Three days later, my stepfather announced that he was divorcing my mother. He had had enough, he said. He had only stuck it out while his daughter was still at home, but there was nothing for my mother to worry about, because she would get alimony.
"She wept and pleaded, but it was no use. He moved out that night. It was then that my mother truly began to deteriorate."
TBC….again.
A/N: Thank you, IluvBrian710! Always glad to have a new fan! I do have an original novel that is on hold until I feel I've learned enough to revise/rewrite it and send it out. It was my first novel-length story and it's uneven. In the meantime, I'm honing my skills in fanfic, although if Marvel comics wants me to work for them, I wouldn't say no! ;-)
Thornwitch: I haven't decided whether they heard or not...I'll get back to that. Check out If Music, I havea chapter up you might not have seen.
Hi, Tiktok! Thank you! Hope you enjoy this one!
Hello, Madripoor Rose! I got the first Books of Doom today--it looks beautiful, but it doesn't go into much new territory. I'm not sure what approach they're taking yet--the tragic, flawed Machiavellian hero, or the raving lunatic villain, or somewhere in between...Not much third person dialog from him in it, as yet. I plan to dive into some of Victor's background in the chapters which deal with their return to Latveria and build up to the wedding. Valeria, Victor's childhood sweetheart, and the girl he didn't marry, will definitly put in an appearance.
Hi, Gothikstrawberry! I did promise to get into Jo's past--this is the beginning of it!
And Julietsdaughter, are you still out there? I've missed you! That goes for you too, Chantrea Savann!