Disclaimer: I don't own any characters except my characters. Which are quite a few this time around. Let's try it this way: I don't own any Marvel characters that happen to show up in the upcoming chapters and which I'm sure you'll recognise without any need to name long lists. I also do not own Jenny, which Dizi created a few years back and which is a fabulous character. I strongly recommend you read her adventures with Wolverine and the X-Men.
13. Memories
Everything was still. Light. Bright even. Unmoving. Isabel blinked, not recognising where she was, and tried to sit up. Her whole body was heavy and sore, but she forced it to obey her. Once she had sat up, she felt calmer again. Everything was still. Her eyes moved lethargically, taking in her whereabouts. Look, there was a big fridge with a glass door. Things inside it that weren't food. And the counter. There were papers there, too. And a computer. A tiny red speckle scintillated on the monitor and caught her eye. She gazed at it sleepingly. When her eyes started moving again, they noticed the papers on the counter. A fridge with glass doors. A door that stood ajar, showing darkness on the other side. Another door, this one closed. A great expanse of white wall. Beds. Empty beds.
A thumping noise shocked her heart into a mad race and her head swirled around towards a window. She had to blink twice before she realised the dark shape belonged to a bird. It chirped once. Twice. Then it flew off. Blinking, her eyes traded the now gone dark shape of the bird for the bright light prisioned outside. She sat there, hypnotised by the brightness. Eventually, she realised how far away from her it was and got up to reach it.
Her body felt alien and refused to respond promptly, but she forced it. Slowly. A bit of pain here, soreness there, stiffness somewhere else. It didn't matter, though; not as Isabel kept her thoughtless gaze on the bright window. The floor was cold against her feet, but the rest of her body must have been too busy to notice it since the feeling hardly reached up to her ankles. It was so bright, the day on the other side of the invisible window pane; yet, it was so irreparably unaccessible. Curiously, the window glass was cold, too. It felt neither good nor bad on her hands, but her forehead liked its tender bite. Nevertheless, Isabel could feel the intense heat on the other side of the cold glass. All its cheer, carefreeness and happiness. All the joy that was banned to her, even if it paraded so freely in front of her, inviting her to join in.
Isabel frowned lightly, trying to catch the idea that floated very discretely through the haze of her mind, but it was in vain. Her head was empty. Annoyingly empty. So why wasn't she getting annoyed? Irritated? Upset? Angry? Another thought formed itself, but this time she was able to grab it: this is wrong. This wasn't her, this alien calm that tied her to slow movements, missing feelings and forced stupidity. It wasn't her at all.
Glancing away from the window, she felt the vertigo. It wasn't physical, though.
"Never fall in love, if you can," the voice came from the small stone step at the entrance of Grandma Lilia's house, which the late afternoon sun would heat up into lazy, timeless comfort. "You can be perfectly happy without love. If you do your work right and are honest with yourself and the world, you'll be happier than most folks."
Isabel felt the sun of the Spring on her naked arms and knees. Grandma Lilia would always sit on the entrance stone step while knitting or embroidering or doing something similar. She could spend hours there, working silently, chit-chatting to the few people that crossed the small, out of the way street where her house stood. But then Inês – because that was her name back then, in that long lost life – would arrive from school, get a glass of milk and a plate with bread and butter, and she would sit by her side, eating. Mimicking her silence. Waiting. Because, sooner or later, Grandma Lilia would start talking.
Sometimes it was an exciting story, like when her Uncle José das Quintas had been faced by a couple of bulls that had escaped from their field. Sometimes it was a thrilling story of her own childhood, like when a colleague had taken his shoes off to play football, during school recess, but someone had dropped them into a well and a couple of mindlessly brave children had descended to retrieve them. Sometimes it was a bittersweet story (at least for Grandma, judging from her voice and from the final sigh), like when someone's wife had had a particularly difficult labour and Grandma had had to kick the doctor out to save the baby. Sometimes it was a strange story – an important story from the grown-ups' school of life, no doubt – which she often found difficult to understand.
"Why?"
Inês-Isabel had always loved the exciting stories of escaping bulls, thieves in the night and clever workers outsmarting their strict employers, but there was something alluring in those stories of giving birth – which were always explained in detail, each action taken and why, always ending with new life, bloodied and fragile, brought into existence only due to Grandma Lilia's knowledge. Most importantly, though, there was something terribly alluring in those cryptic warnings that might save her – in the distant future after her school days were over – from a life of bleak grief and aching.
"When you aren't in love, your happiness depends on you, my dear. You do what God has destined for you, and that is enough to make you feel happy, and proud, and capable of facing the whole world. But when you are in love, your happiness depends on the man you want. If he does come to you when you need him, when you call for him, you will be happy. But if he doesn't come, or if he stops coming, then you will feel unhappy. Miserable. You may even feel satisfied with your life, your hardwork; but you will never feel happy again."
Inês-Isabel heard Grandma sigh – she always sighed in a broodingly deep fashion after those warnings – and the vertigo attacked her again. She knew, quite clearly, that the dizziness was inside her head, maybe only inside her heart, but she still advanced to the bed drunkenly. The whiteness of the room oppressed her and for a moment she couldn't breathe properly. A frozen gust of wind blew through her insides, and Isabel knew that it wasn't her. Not right then, it wasn't. She needed to pull herself together, escape that cold nothingness inside her that stopped her normal reasoning and made her... suicidal. Like Victor used to say. Suicidal. Victor.
"If he does come to you when you need him..."
"Veetohr," she whispered, not really realising her throat had produced any sound.
"But if he doesn't come..."
"Veetohr."
She needed to think, to see her life with a clear mind, to face what must be faced calmly and steadily. But she couldn't think, she couldn't feel, she couldn't... she couldn't escape this mind prison that she couldn't even pinpoint.
"Veetohr!"
He could help her, clear her head, make her see. He could.
"Veetohr!"
If he came.
"VEETOHR!"
"Sometimes," Grandma Lilia explained while she checked her work, "he may even want to come to you, but he won't be able to. Because people don't let him, for example. He could be in jail or away at work. Or because it wouldn't be proper. A man of good families will never come to a woman below him, even if that means he'll be just as miserable as she is. Or he could be dead. That will definitely keep a man away."
Because no. No, it wouldn't be proper. In Creston… In Creston, it was proper. In Creston, he did not keep away. Would never have. But Creston was a farse, would always be. Here, however… here was the real world. His real world, a world of fights and mutant wars and enemies and super-villains and… this was the real world. Sabretooth's world. It would never be proper no matter how much he might want…
"VEETOHR!"
Isabel didn't realise the despair that had sunk into her voice, her heavy breathing, her nails digging into the sheets and mattress, the half snarl twisting her lips. The room was no longer there, around her, only the fact that it wouldn't be proper. He might want to come to her. He might even want to kill the whole world to get to her. But it wouldn't be proper. It would never be proper... not in his world, not in his head.
"I just hope and pray you won't have such a heavy fate to go through, my darling. Because, quite frankly, stubborn as you are, you'd sooner break than bend, wouldn't you? You'd fight against it, set the world on fire... and all for nothing because, really, you can't go against fate no matter how much you hate it."
Someone rushed to her side, coming from nowhere, but all that mattered was that it wasn't Victor: he would never come to her. Not in the real world.
"You make peace and learn to live with it, that's all." Make peace with the fact that he would never come to her side? How could she ever! "Or you'll live angrily and bitterly for the rest of your life."
The touch on her skin shattered something inside her. She could have sworn she had hollered, like Victor did when he went berserk in a fight. She attacked the embodiment of fate that had dared to touch her – after all it had put her through, these last few years! – and she fought for all she was worth. Oh, how she wished she had learned something from Victor, when he had tried to teach her how to fight!
But fate can't be fought. More hands rained on her and scream as she might, kick and punch as she tried, fate could not be averted.
"My silly little girl," Grandma Lilia pulled Inês's brown eyes into hers, green as Winter. "If something is meant to be, you can't change it; no matter what you do. That's what fate is all about, my darling."
"VEETOHR! VEETOHR!" Isabel cried, desperately, hopelessly, refusing to give in, rebelling even in defeat. "VEETOOOOOOHR!"
If you've enjoyed the chapter, please leave a review. Just let me know what you liked and disliked so I can keep improving my writing skills. Thank you.