NOTE: The line Ichabod quotes at the end of this chapter is from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.
Ichabod shook his head pitifully, feeling the pressure of his sin on his soul. "She sacrificed herself so that I might last long enough in the coffin until you found me. She…gave her life...for mine. She insisted that one of us had to survive to battle Moloch and Jeremy. There is nothing that can be done."
Jenny looked at him for a long time, and he thought she looked like a pot about to boil over, her anger simmering just beneath her skin. Then suddenly, her hands clenched into fists and he braced himself for what he was certain was soon to be a flurry of her fists against his face. But, sadly, she didn't hit him, though he found himself wishing she had. He deserved it.
She simply stood up, and she was so serenely quiet that Ichabod found it more disconcerting than if she were screaming vulgarities at him. At last, she spoke.
"So what, you and Ginger Spice out there are just gonna live happily ever after while my sister rots in Purgatory?" she seethed.
"I'm giving you that happily ever after…"
He gasped as Abbie's voice cut through his mind.
Jenny looked at him strangely, but apparently decided to ignore his behavior for the moment and absently sat back down. She seemed to be too caught up in her anger, her dark eyes on fire.
"Let me see if I got all the details straight, ok? One, you let my sister exchange places with Katrina in Purgatory and don't try to deny it because Jessica Rabbit, out there, told me all about it. Two, you let Abbie stay there knowing it was what Moloch wanted all along and three, you're now you're perfectly happy to let her stay there forever? Did I hit all the bullet points?" She paused a moment to catch her breath but continued quickly. "Well, no way in hell is that happening. Maybe you've already given her up for dead, but I haven't. I'm getting her back…with or without your help."
She pushed up from the chair and looked at him in disgust, arms crossed. "Should I tell the little wifey to come back in now so you two can patch things up? You can tell her it was just a mistake and you weren't really saying you loved my sister…"
Ichabod said nothing. He found himself unable to form words laying there looking into eyes that were so eerily reminiscent of those he loved dearly. He swore he could hear the spark of Abbie inside him keening in grief at the sight even as it tried to stop him from crumbling in despair.
Jenny continued ranting, oblivious to his pain. "You know, for a while there, I thought maybe you really did love her. I thought maybe Abbie finally found somebody who cared about her and would put her first, but I guess I couldn't have been more wrong. You're just another in a long line of selfish bastards after all. I'm starting to wish I never found you, after all."
She waited a few beats and then made a sound of derision and turned, storming from the room.
"I, too, wish you had not found me," he said gently, before she reached the threshold, his voice raspy.
She stopped – barely – but didn't turn to look at him. He could tell she wanted to bolt from the room – the same way her younger version wanted to in Purgatory. Neither version seemed to want to be in his presence for very long. He could assign no blame to such a sentiment.
"I do not wish to see Katrina at this time," he finally said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I will not try to convince you of my feelings for your sister, but I would like to assuage your fears about my treatment of her. From the moment she volunteered to stay and every moment after, I have regretted my willingness to let her do so. I have cursed myself a thousand times over and will never be able to repent for such a sin. I told her as much. I betrayed her and do not deserve forgiveness. I believed that my punishment was death and to spend eternity in a black void being forever reminded of my transgression. I do not deserve her friendship or love…but…I do…love her…more than I can ever express. I came to the realization while I was in Purgatory with her. I'm sure I knew it subconsciously for some time now, but I confessed my feelings to her while I was with her. If there is a way to rescue her from the prison I put her in, then I will do everything in my power to do just that. Even if it means I must stay there in her stead. That is a price I will gladly pay for I fear I will not be able to continue without her."
Jenny turned and looked at him in complete shock.
"What if the only way is for Katrina to go back?"
Ichabod did not hesitate. "Then she will return. In any event, your sister and Katrina were only supposed to exchange places temporarily."
Jenny made a disbelieving snort, but he was certain that she was perhaps at least starting to doubt her earlier verdict about him.
"I'll believe that one when I see it." She turned again, to leave.
"A request, Miss Jenny?"
She stood, waiting, one eyebrow raised.
"Do you still retain possession of the Lieutenant's 'smartphone'?" he asked softly.
Jenny immediately stuck her hand into a pocket of her vest and pulled the phone out. "Yeah, why?"
"May I please have it?"
"There's nothing on it that can help us, Crane. I already checked."
"Please…" he begged, his voice thick with tears and pain.
Jenny shrugged and handed it to him. "Okay…here. I'm going to go and get rid of Red. You get dressed and when I get back, we're sneaking you out of here pronto. We can't afford to waste time while you 'recover'."
Crane nodded weakly, looking down at the phone reverently. "Physically, I am quite well, Miss Jenny."
She nodded, but looked at him strangely - as though she didn't quite believe him. "Great…"
"Thank you for finding me," he said, but when he looked back up, she was already gone.
It was then that he realized he had not even bothered to ask how Katrina had managed to escape the Horseman – for she obviously had – and he wondered if it were possible to sink any lower into the murky depths of selfishness. It seemed he could not do right by either of the women he had ever professed to love.
Crane looked back down at the phone and after a few failed attempts, pulled up Abbie's text messages. He quickly found one of the last ones she sent to him.
It said, "See you soon, Crane." He looked away, his arms yearning to hold her in a fierce embrace, as he remembered their soft and quiet goodbye in Purgatory and Abbie's ultimate sacrifice. The image of her being held up by Moloch threatened at the edge of his mind, but he did his best to push it away and picture her under the bleachers of the baseball field, as she had asked, but omehow, he just felt like he was deceiving himself. She was not sitting under bleachers in the midst of a summer day watching a baseball game. She was being tortured by a demon in a place as close to Hell as he had ever seen and she was there because of him.
He turned from the phone and looked into the mirror in his hospital room. It was directly across from his bed as though waiting for him to gaze into it.
Suddenly, he felt an unnatural breeze lift the hair from his neck and the mirror fractured, revealing Abbie sitting at the kitchen table of the dark dollhouse. A solitary tear ran down her cheek. Behind her, he saw the shadow of Moloch on the wall and heard a song playing in the background. It was a song he had never heard before and yet some of the words were familiar to him.
"So love me tonight…Tomorrow was made for some…Tomorrow may never come...For all we know…"
It was the song she had referenced to him in Purgatory. "'Tomorrow was made for some,' she had said. The memory chilled him and he shuddered. Had she been foretelling her own death? Preparing him for it?
The Abbie in the mirror smiled sadly then and raised her hand in an apparent final gesture of farewell. She brought her fingers to her lips and kissed them, then placed them above her heart. Ichabod watched in equal parts of grief and horror as Moloch's shadow advanced, growing larger against the wall. Abbie seemed to sense his presence and looked behind her for a moment. When she turned back, her smile had been replaced with a look of sheer terror. She reached out to Ichabod, as if begging for help, but before he could find his voice to call out, the mirror broke all the way and the pieces blew back into its solid form.
Crane opened his eyes, and found that he was shaking. He looked again at the message on the phone.
"See you soon, Crane."
He gently stroked the phone's screen, his hand trembling. "I'll miss you, always and love you, forever…" he said brokenly, echoing her gossamer goodbye. He turned to look out the window and a tear streaked down his cheek.
When he had come to understand his feelings for her in Purgatory, Ichabod had discovered a small hope inside that somehow, he and Miss Mills would both escape and they might have a chance at some kind of life together – however tenuous it might be. During his time with her there, that hope had lived inside him, thrumming with life, its feather's bright and resplendent with the certainty that somehow, they would get that opportunity.
Ichabod couldn't have known that his hope would never take flight or see the light of day, even though perhaps, Abbie had. Nor could he have known that it would die a lonely death, perched on the remains of his spirit, waiting for a day that was never to be.
Was this what giving up felt like, he wondered? Surrendering? Admitting to failure? It felt unclean and ruined – the way the pristine snow looks after it had been trampled by horses and men heading off to war. It was an unknown emotion to him, for he had never in his life given in to defeat before.
Abbie's face filled his mind again and he felt a surge of pain and anger flood his body. Wincing, he ripped out the strange tubing that had been inserted into his arm and threw the covers off of himself, pushing unsteadily to his feet. Even though Abbie believed herself lost to the mortal world, it did not make it so. She had told him once that "there is always another way." He decided then that he could not stomach the taste of defeat and he would do whatever it took to find that other way and save Abbie. And then he would find Moloch and kill him for his transgressions against her.
Walking with an uneven gait to the window, for his muscles were still sore and cramped, he held onto the frame for support and looked out at the woods beyond the hospital. They were dark and heavy with mist and reminded him too much of the woods beyond the dollhouse in Purgatory.
He spoke softly, his breath fogging up the window and blurring the woods into strange shapes and shades of black and grey.
"Hear me, Moloch and know that this will not stand. I will not yield and I will not let you do this to the one I love. 'Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge.'"
Ichabod focused on nothing but repeating the last sentence over and over – his new mantra – until he dove deep into himself where he found the remains of Abbie's spark. It pulled him close – the way he knew she would if she were there with him – and filled him with comfort. For a few precious moments, he was able to feel as though they were together again and drew strength from that union as he had in the past. He knew he would need all the strength he could muster, for there was a battle coming: a battle for Abbie's soul.
The mantra became almost a meditation or prayer and he went even deeper inside and to a place where all the sounds around him floated away again like soft feathers fluttering against the sky.