Over and over he moves and each time he is just too late. Too late to save her, too late to stop the thud of the bullet into the softness of her body. Her harsh intake of breath resonating in his ears. He feels before he actually sees her fall, the blood blooming against the dark satin of her dress turning it black in the moonlight. Her eyes blaze for a moment iridescent in their blueness straight into his trying to tell him something before they fade to nothing and he holds her, just a limp shell and howls his agony into the night sky, desolate he never got to tell her the truth. Then the hands are back pulling at him trying to take her away, trying to keep her from him but he will not let them, he will not let go again, he will not leave her again, he will never leave her again. He fights against them thrashing wildly but his strength is failing, pain consumes him, his chest is on fire and then the hands change. Become softer but more insistent more dominant and then a voice. Harsh and uncompromising but like it is coming from another time, another place.
"Victor, Victor we're losing him. Victor now, do something now, please." And then closer, a murmur so intimate directed at him, a voice softer now full of an emotion he can hardly believe but it's so real, so true. "Ethan hold on. You can't die, you've got to hold on my love. I won't let you leave me. Please Ethan don't leave me again. Not again."
He tries to speak, to find her in the darkness that he can't seem to break free of, to touch her but he can't reach out and then an intrusion, the stab of metal into his arm and the rush of drugs that sends him spiralling down, further and further away from her and there is nothing he can do but leave her. Leave her again.
He didn't remember waking or even realising he was awake. The slip into consciousness was one of such subtly that he couldn't really put his finger on when it had happened. He was aware of grey light filtering in through his eyelids that it seemed that he couldn't remember how to open. His body felt heavy, devoid of feeling and yet restricted. As his awareness slowly seeped back he became aware of a presence with him and then fractures of memories began to coalesce. Him standing at the threshold of a door. The gleam of a dull brass lighter in the white, delicate hand of a woman and then a gunshot ringing out in the cold, clear air and pain, white hot pain searing thorough him.
"Vanessa!" The name tore from him and he struggled to sit up in a suddenly familiar bed his eyes tearing open to see a room he'd never thought he'd see again, the room he'd called his own for a few short weeks before the series of events that started this hideous turn of events. A spasm of pain tore through him he could hardly take the breath into his burning lungs. He felt he was drowning in it, fighting against it as it spread through his frame. Suddenly the presence he's sensed was there leaning over him. But it was not the one he expected or hoped for. Eyes of watery grey, red rimmed and shadowed with deep purple bruises gazed at him with what could only be described as professional interest. They moved away and he heard the clink of glass and then seconds later the brush of cold metal against the inside of him arm.
"Wait, Doc, wait. Don't. No drugs, please."
To his relief the needle was removed and Victor Frankenstein's fine features swam into sight again.
"Ethan. Christ I was wondering if you were ever going to wake. We almost lost you so many times I'm not quite sure how you survived it but something seemed to keep you going. I swear you died two or three times but then, suddenly your heart would start beating again. You're a bloody medical miracle." His face broke into something that resembled a smile tinged with what could only be described as irritation. "So do you remember what happened?"
His mind cast back to that night and what he could remember before the bullet tore into him and suddenly he remembered crashing into a soft body and blood staining deep, green satin.
"Vanessa is she okay? She wasn't hit, hurt? Where is she? I thought she was here, I thought I heard her." He could feel the panic rising in him. Was this why Victor looked so tired was he nursing her too, was the nightmare that haunted him true? Had she taken the bullet with him? Was she dead? He struggled again to sit but the tightness in his chest was too much and he shrunk onto the mattress wracked with pain.
Victor's forehead creased and a shadow passed over his face but his voice seemed calm and unruffled.
"No, no she was fine. Suffered a few bruises from you falling into her when you fell but no the bullet that hit you didn't hurt her at all. To be honest I think it was her that kept you going. She was like something possessed. I got home just after it happened and somehow she'd managed to drag you into the hall and had staunched the worst of the bleeding. She's sat with you constantly since it happened praying and whispering to you. If I believed in such things I'd say she called you back. She defied you to die. She's refused to leave your side for the last two weeks. An hour ago I finally persuaded her to go to her room for a rest." For a moment his face twisted and the words that fell from his lips seemed shadowed by an faintly veiled undertone of something that for a moment Ethan could not put his finger on.
"There seems to be some connection between you. She would speak and even though you were full of drugs and without any semblance of life you'd seem to respond. Her voice, even her coming into the room for the moments she had to leave would seem to drag you back from wherever you'd gone." His laugh sounded bitter and it suddenly became clear and for just a moment he revelled in it. That tone so measured, so careful was an attempt at masking bitter and barely concealed jealousy. But at that moment he suddenly empathised with the man who so long in his eyes had been the obstruction regarding his want. The words Vanessa had said just before she'd sent him away that night rang in his ears, an unwanted but poignant echo.
"Do not hate him. He does not deserve your hatred. You owe him more than anyone Ethan. And although you know the truth, in this you choose to obscure it with loathing."
Guilt flooded through him as the truth of those words struck home. He was indeed beholdent to the pale, thin man who sat by his side. Not just for his skills, which however much he passed that success onto his wife, surely had been the main reason for his continued life but for using those skills to heal and not to harm. How easy it would have been for his to allow his rival, because surely that was now how he viewed him, to slip away from life by the imbuing into his veins of just a little too much of the drugs that had eased the worst of his pain. To end the suffering of his body that threatened his peace and his own soul. To irrevocably keep the woman he'd won as solely his. As he gazed into the eyes of the man who had saved his life he wondered if he could ever be that magnanimous but knew in his soul that he could not. Had the tables been turned he would have killed, not cured.
The silence stretched uncomfortably between then and it was Ethan who was the first to drop his gaze looking down at his chest naked apart from a tight swathing of bandages. He trailed his hand over the linen to try and feel through the covering the site the bullet had entered and finally just above his left pectoral muscle found a tender spot.
Victor's light tone broke through his musing, "You were lucky it entered where it did. An inch or two lower and to the right and you would have been beyond my skill. Yes an inch or two was all it would have taken….." .
Ethan looked up as the doctor's voice faded and in those pale grey eyes before they were quickly dropped he swore he saw a gleam of what he could only describe as mild regret and for the first time in his relationship with the man standing in front of him he felt the cold slice of fear piece his heart. For a moment he considered confronting him with this knowledge, calling him out, forcing the issue. To instigate the conversation that for him had been a canker in his soul but which for Victor was yet a graze that should now begin to fester raking deeper and deeper into his conscience becoming an unhealing harm. But the understanding of Victor's suspicion was all but obliterated at the opening of the bedroom door.
Framed in the doorway her pale dress seeming to glow softly in the weak sunlight that filtered thought the half opened curtains of the room, she stood. He could not see her face which was in shadow but he could feel the intensity of her gaze like a living tangible force against his skin directed straight into his flesh. His mouth went dry and in that moment there was nothing except them and the unspoken, unadmitted emotion. His fingers twisted into the sheets trying to still the trembling that ripped through him at the sight of her. Slowly she moved further into the room and he was able to make out her features tight with fatigue and concern but her eyes blazed iridescent with relief.
"Victor, Sir Malcolm has just woken but seems to be suffering some discomfort." At the sound of her voice his heart clenched but her eyes never left his and in them he saw the glitter of tears gathering in the winter blue.
"I'll go to him immediately my dear of course. As you can see Mr Chandler has awoken. Maybe you can sit with him and when I come back I'll further examine his injuries and discover how he is recuperating."
He barely noticed the doctor leaving the room, his eyes filled only by the sight of her. She stood immobile the fall and rise of her chest the only movement in the stillness until the sharp click of Sir Malcolm's door shutting down the hall seemed to awaken her. A strangled sob escaped her lips at the sound and she stumbled towards the bed. Without thinking he opened his arms and she fell into them her face buried against the linen that bound his chest and for a moment he was unsure if the pain he felt was physical from his wounds or the emotions that bubbled up inside of him at the feeling of her body finally against his. His arms wound around her shaking frame, his hands found the heavy satin of her hair and he felt the heat of her tears seep against his skin.
"Thank God, thank God. I thought I'd lost you. I thought you'd die and I'd never be able to tell you." Her voice was muffled against his body but the emotion in it was real and a sudden wild joy ran through him not only that she was unharmed and here in his arms but at the words that tumbled from her mouth.
"Tell me what Vanessa?" Although it made him feel bereaved to remove what he'd ached for for so long, gently he pushed her away from his body to look into her tear soaked face. Her hands fluttered up to his face her fingers pressing against his cheeks running over the roughness of his beard and brushing against his lips.
Her face mouth stretched into a smile but there was no ounce of joy in the upturn of her lips and her eyes were nothing but pits of despair as she whispered, "That I love you."
He thought for a moment that he'd misheard her that it was his want and need to hear the words that had formed the sound in his ears, but when her mouth lowered to his and he felt the softness of her lips against his flavoured with the salt of her tears that continued to flow as she pressed a kiss of infinite gentleness onto his mouth, he knew it was true.
Slowly she eased back but his hands found the back of her head and he pulled her back to his mouth welding his lips to hers trying in that touch of tenderness and passion to convey the abject apology that he knew he owed her for the pain he had caused her and begging for her forgiveness.
When they finally drew apart, her tears had stopped flowing but drops hung on the whiteness and cupping that face that haunted both his waking and sleeping hours he brushed his thumbs across her cheeks in the gesture that was so familiar that as the ache blossomed in him he saw the remembrance of it shadow her eyes where more tears welled.
"No darlin' no more tears please. I'm gonna be fine,"
The smile that didn't reach her eyes stretched her mouth again and he ached for the lack of joy. She sat back although her fingers found his hand, winding through his digits.
"I know that now Ethan. I know you'll recover your full strength due in part to Victor's skill and my art. But our troubles are far from over. Our suffering begins in earnest my love because now we add another's pain. You and I have lived with this affliction and we are strong, our past troubles have made us so. But Victor is not and what is to come, what must come will break him. I heard what he said to you and I recognise as I know you did the blossoming seed of suspicion. He will never admit it and possibly does not yet really know it himself but he will look for betrayal. I tried so hard to keep it hidden thinking his love for me would blind him, protect him from the truth. But my love for you and in part yours for me is a storm and what breeze of affection and purity can stand against it? I should have known, I did know and yet I allowed it to happen, or did nothing to stop it."
She tightened her grip on his hand her other returning to cup the side of his head. He closed his eyes reeling in the joy of her touch but pained by the truth of her words. If he'd had the physical strength he would have run from the house pulling her with him because he knew in that moment she would go, leave the half-life she'd built but it was impossible. He had neither the strength and as the image of Victor's pale face swam into his brain guilt slammed into him. What had Victor ever done but love and care for the woman he'd to recklessly abandoned. Without him God alone knows what Vanessa would have done in those months alone, where she would have found herself. Victor had offered her security, sanity in her world of horrors and all he'd ever done was add to them. He not only owed him his life but also the life of the woman whose hand he held but had little right to.
"We have to stop it Vanessa. We have to stop this now. We can't rip another life to pieces because we suffer. Victor is innocent. I see that now. He is the one who deserves happiness and we need to see to it that he gets it. We owe him our lives we are beholdent to him." He could feel her hand tighten on his and when he opened his eyes he saw her face bone white but her eyes full of bitter understanding and acceptance.
The thought of never being able to touch her again never feeling her pliant against him as she had just minutes before, never again to feel the silken touch of her mouth against his the taste of her lips cut through him searing it seemed his very flesh from his bones. In despair he raised her hand to his lips and placed a kiss into the very centre of her palm folding her fingers back over it as a keepsake.
Again she smiled and again all he could see in her eyes were loss and suffering, an exact mirror of his own. She stood then and he watched her seem to physically stiffen her resolve. Her armour was in place. She walked away but as she got to the door she stopped for a second and he heard in her voice a hollowness as empty as his own hope.
"To pain my love."