Tori had a song for this occasion, too: Me and a Gun. One night she accepted a ride home from a gig with a stranger, who had turned out to have a gun on him. She sang the song of that rape completely a capella, only words, no musical accompaniment at all—stark horror, fear for her life, yet filled with an intense desire to live.
'I haven't seen Barbados, so I must get out of here.' Barbados held no such significance to me, but I desperately wanted to live. Victor would not rape me, but he might—he really might kill me.
I had known what he was. I had known what he was capable of, and I had gotten involved with him anyway.
The landscape of my grandmother's back yard, on that afternoon in February, coalesced around us. I gagged, feeling the bile from my churning stomach rise to burn the back of my throat. Victor looked around and pulled me to my feet—by my arm, not my hair, and marched me to a cluster of trees that would screen us from the house and the street. My car was already parked in the driveway—my younger self was hiding my boxes, papers and notebooks in the attic.
I was shivering hard; it was a normal February for Pennsylvania, but I was wearing only a light summer dress and sandals.
"You are trembling, my dear." He said those last two words with such acid sarcasm I flinched. "You have cause to be afraid."
"I'm not afraid." I lied. "I'm freezing."
He looked at me a long moment before he unfastened his cloak and handed it to me. "I am weak." he said, self-loathing. "I know you to be false and still you move me. You insinuated yourself behind all of my defenses, you crept in and took hold on me. But I will root you out. I will overcome this weakness."
"If I am true, if what you think is not the truth—what then?" I asked, as I fastened the cape around me. I would have liked to let it fall to the ground, in defiance, but I was too cold.
"Then I shall go down on my knees and beg your forgiveness." He said, sardonically.
"That may not be enough to mend this." I told him.
"You keep up such an innocent façade. But when I have those notes—which you do not even deny you made—I will not be made a fool of," he warned me.
"Victor—those notes. My mother didn't read you all of them. She hates me. She wants to destroy my life, as she believes I ruined hers."
"Ah, yes. Your mother. When you told me of your life with her, you never told me about your subtle little revenges." he said.
"What revenges? I don't know what she may have told you, but remember—she's not sane, she's schizophrenic, she—." I was beginning to get shrill—I controlled it.
"You never told me how you stole from her wallet—how you put crushed sleeping pills in her coffee—how you lied to her. Do you deny these things?"
"No—. They were true, but the context—." I tried.
"Ha!" he said.
"I only did it because I had to!" I pleaded. "She never gave me any money for shoes—I could wear her cast-off clothing, but my feet grew too big for me to wear her shoes. When my old pair were falling apart, when the soles were thin as paper, then I would take the money for a new pair, only then. And I had to lie to her when she told me to tell the neighbors she would shoot them if they kept going through our trash. They weren't, it was raccoons. The sleeping pills—she would get so she didn't sleep for days, I was trying to help her."
"She said you would have plausible excuses." Victor replied.
"She is plausible, too." I whispered. "That was how she got me fired from so many jobs. Victor, can't you see this is like when Magneto kidnapped me, and you thought I had run away…"
"Do not call me that any longer. That was for when I thought your affection genuine." Victor snapped at me. "Tell me, how old am I? I had thought I was thirty-seven, but it seems I must be mistaken."
"What?" I asked, bewildered. That had come out of the blue, as far as I was concerned.
"You said that the time distortion which affects our reality began when Richards took the four of them through a cosmic storm—in 1961." He was furious.
"Yes."
"Forty-five years ago." Victor riposted.
"Yes." I said again.
"Yet I went to college with Reed Richards and Benjamin Grimm, years before the Fantastic Four was born." Victor continued, logically.
"I know." was all I could say.
"It follows I must be affected by the distortion—yet you said nothing of it to me. I, too, must have lived through those forty-five years—yet I am but little older than I was when it began. Somehow you neglected to tell me of this. "
"Because there wasn't time—and I wanted you to come to that realization on your own." I had thought he might realize it when we were talking to the Watcher, but he had not. "Or at least I wanted to have my proofs on hand when I broke that news to you."
"Your proofs!" he half-shouted. "You want to end the time-distortion, do you not?"
"Yes."
"When a man might live forever, never growing old or feeble, within it?" he asked, enraged. Yes, Victor would want to be immortal…
"It isn't truly living." I cast about for an analogy, and the best one that came to mind was from Terry Pratchett. "It's as if you took a glass of wine—only one glass—poured it into a bathtub, and then filled the tub with water. You'd have a lot more liquid, but the same amount of wine. In this case, your life is the wine, and time is the water. And there is a price that comes with it—you have no free will."
He stared at me—the stare that tried to pry out meaning. "Your proofs had better be phenomenal."
"They are—but not to a mind that goes in already closed." I replied.
"Quiet." He ordered me. "I believe you are leaving."
I knew the sound of that car—it was the one I bought with Janet's check, after her then-husband threw mine through the store window and demolished my cash register.
He waited until the sound of my car faded away before setting out across the yard for the house. I hurried after him, clutching his cloak around me. He opened the back door with a spell, and went in.
I paused on the step. I had not been back in my grandmother's house since the day I had hidden the proofs…Which would still be the truth, technically, but for me it had been over three years. It had cost me a great deal to cross that threshold the last time.
"Are you coming?" asked Victor from inside, impatient.
I could turn and run. I had no identification, true, and I was pregnant, but I still had that king's ransom emerald on my hand—except that I didn't. I had taken it off when I was trying on the dresses, lest it snag the fabric, and I hadn't put it back on. I was penniless…
I wouldn't have to go down to the basement, I told myself. I wouldn't have to relive my mother's attempt to kill me. I could just stick to the upper levels.
I braced myself, and went in.