I was surprised by his response.
"No." He said it coldly, definite and final. "Werner Von Doom was my father. No other shall have that honor from my lips. If there were any who might—then Boris should be he, but for a certain reason I determined never to call him so. I have forgiven him for it—but I shall never forget it."
"Oh," I said, dumfounded for a moment. "May I ask what it was?"
"I would prefer not to speak of it. My reason is sufficient. That is why he remains my servant, although thirty years and more have passed since that…occurrence." The ice in his voice told me it was time for a change of subject, but I was not about to abandon Boris or whatever reason Victor had for not making an old man truly happy. I would get back to it, and find out what it was— later.
"I understand. It's something only you can judge." I took some grapes. "By the way, are we going to have a honeymoon?"
"Yes. I have arranged to have a week free. I would that it were longer, but there are matters which will require my personal attention, or yours."
"A whole week." I smiled. "That sounds lovely. In all truth, it feels like we're already honeymooning—and I'm not just talking about the sex."
"What—even though we must sit on the floor and dine on bread and water, forced into hiding in our own home?"
"You're leaving out this excellent cheese and delicious fruit. This is hardly a hardship. I'm going to remember this night for the rest of my life," I said, looking around the room, "much more than I will any number of ordinary dinners. Besides-you're here—we're alive and well and together. Nothing can be too wrong when that is the case. All the rest—is just a minor inconvenience."
He was silent for a long moment. "You have an extraordinary capacity for happiness, my dear, and a unique ability to include others within it—for which I am grateful, since I am nearest to you. From where do you come by this?"
I laughed. "I don't know. From the right brain chemistry—serotonin and endorphins. Or, if I were to be fanciful—perhaps my mother did kill me. Perhaps I am dead, and this is heaven—my heaven. I've always thought the conventional idea of Heaven—harps, halos and hosannas for all Eternity—would be intolerably boring. So uneventful."
"You said something similar to me once before." Victor commented, tilting his head slightly to regard me with particular interest.
"I did? I don't recall it."
"When you were dead." he said.
"That again!" I teased, and started gathering up the remnants of our picnic. Nothing was left but the rind from the cheese, a few fruit pits and stems, and the centerpiece rose. "Just to show you, I won't ask what I said. Where are we going on our honeymoon, anyway?"
"To—an undisclosed location. I want to surprise you. However, I believe you will like it. After all, " he said, wryly, "you will be with me."
"So I will." I gave him my best enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, and stood up.
He stood up, too. "Will you lie down and rest for a while, before you start in on your spellcasting?" I asked. If I could get him to lie down, even money said he would fall asleep, and no matter what he said or believed, he needed sleep.
"For a while." he agreed. "Not long."
Once we were laying down, he said, "Tomorrow, once I have learned the identity of the one who is responsible for this, we will take back your ring and annihilate these impostors on our way out. Then we shall proceed to the location where that one is, and, for formality's sake, politely request that they put the world back the way it was. When that fails, as it certainly will, we will put the matter to them more forcefully. What will you do in the meantime?"
"I will have to be somewhere that I can be found, so that Cynthia can check my teeth and my hips. Beyond that—do you recall how the Trojan war started?"
"Eris threw an apple among the gods when they sat feasting. It was marked, 'For the fairest', and it was the apple of discord. The goddesses fought among themselves for it, until they referred the matter to an independent judge—Paris. They offered him bribes; he chose Aphrodite's offer of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. He took her home to Troy, and her husband and his brother came with their friends to fetch her back."
"Tomorrow you can call me Eris. I mean to cast some discord among these self-satisfied monsters. The impostor is going to face the fact that his happy little family is like a shiny red apple that's rotting on the inside." I also meant to make the impostor Doom give me back my ring, without threatening him, offering, implying or granting him any sexual favors. No, he was going to think he did it of his own free will—but telling Victor that seemed—indiscreet. He might start wondering whether I manipulated him, and that would never do…
"And there lies one fundamental difference between you and Valeria—the real Valeria." Victor said, pensively. "One of many, but perhaps the most significant."
"Mmm?" I asked.
Evidently he wanted to talk about her, right then. "She and I fought before I left for America. She accused me of caring more for books than I did for her—I said, in return, that books were a ladder to climb out of poverty, out of obscurity, out of being powerless and despised. What could she do for me that was as important as that? I told her I needed no one, I had no tender or softer feeling in me—and I knew I lied even as I said the words, but I did not take them back. I was—I was very young."
"You were sixteen, weren't you?" I asked.
"Yes. I did not see her again until many years later—until after my face was destroyed. I did not trouble her, because I did not believe she would want to see me—and I was not sure if I wanted to see her. She had made it clear she did not want to lead the life I was destined to live—and she would have been ill-suited to it.
"I dragged myself up and out of the ignorance and squalor, I educated myself in every aspect of etiquette and culture and taste, even as I had taught myself science and mathematics and magic, so that no one should look down their noses and call me a filthy gypsy ever again. It was not easy. By all the gods that ever were, it was not easy."
"I was the first in my family to go to college, let alone graduate. I come from eaters of government-provided cheese and white bread. 'Poor white trash' is the phrase that applies to my kind. I don't pretend it was anything as bad as what you went through, but I know the struggle you speak of." I said, remembering.
He put an arm about my waist, gave me a brief fierce squeeze. "Valeria never learned to read with any fluency, Joviana. I offered and tried to teach her, but she would have none of it. Yet still—. She lived among our people, until one day Diablo, the alchemist, learned of her. He sought to use her as a tool to coerce me to do his bidding. He wanted to be the ruler of the world…
"He told me to take my time machine and gather up the treasures of the ages. He held her hostage—what could I do but seem to agree, and bide my time? It was child's play to defeat him. I altered the area affected by the time field, so it would send the one who worked the controls, and not those who stood on the platform. When he thought to send me back in time—it was he who went hurtling through the centuries—not backward, but forward, to a time when the Earth shall be no more than a burned-out husk, and he, the last human on it. Thus he became the ruler of the world—even as I had promised him."
"Clever move!" I said, admiringly. "He must have been disgruntled when he got there!"
"I thought it was a pity I could not see it myself." Victor said, dryly. "Once he was gone, the spell on Valeria dissipated. I turned to her, I thought—I had just rescued her. I was not what I had been, I was no longer handsome, but I hoped she would look beyond that. She seemed to be my last, my only chance at—companionship. I did not then imagine that I might form another attachment, that I might meet with someone who could care for me, and not for money, position, or power. In short, I had not met you."
I squeezed his arm that time. "For once I don't have the words to answer you." I said.
"No words are needed. You have said them all, and said other things without any words…Valeria said she had heard me gloating over Diablo's fate—and upbraided me with cruelty. She told me not to touch her—she could not bear for me to touch her. She asked me if I would renounce my ambitions for her sake, if I would go back to the life she still led.
"I could make no answer. All I saw was an endless empty life before me—alone, as I had always been alone, as I always would be alone. No grace of a woman's laugh, no scent of her desire, no human warmth… She left, saying we would never meet again. And we have not."
I turned, and wound my arms around him, held him as tightly as I could. I was choked up. "What a stupid heartless bitch she was, then."
He laughed, not a happy one, but one that seemed to free him, for he replied, "Thus you exorcise the crushing darkness that had nearly smothered my soul. The pain of thousands of nights spent reproaching myself, put into perspective with a single statement. 'What a stupid heartless bitch she was, then.' Perhaps she and her impostor are not so different, after all."
A/N: Okay, I'm fed up with Marvel. No sooner do I finish this chapter, which I thought explained Victor's relationship with Valeria nicely, based on the only source material,a story from 1969, but they put out Books of Doom # 3, which contradicts both the original story and my fic in several ways. Phooey! Ignore that comic book!