Chapter Four
The sound of his window snapping open and the scramble of movement outside woke fourteen year old Sophie up with just enough time to stumble out of bed to her own window and slide it up to let Victor begin his climb up. They both heard the thunder of his father's footsteps, the bellow he made as he moved through the house drunk on rage and liquor. It was a cold winter night and Sophie was wearing a white flannel nightgown that covered her from her neck to her wrists and fell to her ankles. It wasn't what twelve year old girls dreamed of wearing or having their crush see them in, but that was the last thing on her mind as she pulled Victor's kicking legs inside and pushed him down between her and the wall just as his dad appeared in the room opposite of hers.
Sophie could feel Victor trembling through his thin clothing, whether from fear or cold she didn't know, pressed up against her as her mind whirled, searching for an action.
Cornelius Zsasz's crazed eyes seemed to glow in the shadows of his son's room, and pierced Sophie's soul. Sophie thought quickly and turned her face from the man to look out towards the street and then back again.
"Did that little shit just climb out this window?" he bellowed, and threw his graying blonde head out the window to follow Sophie's line of sight.
Nothing but the darkness of the street was there, but still she looked out and back again, her own trembling not an act.
"Well girl, what'd ya see?" the man snarled, and Sophie couldn't speak, but felt Victor's hands move around her, his grip still trembling, but she could feel him move, coming to her rescue.
She placed a small hand on Victor's shoulder stopping him, hidden from view under the window, and instead retreated back inside the window, shyly, head down.
"Stupid cow," the old man muttered before turning to look at the street, "Victor, you better come back here, boy!" he shouted, before slamming the window back down.
Sophie pulled the curtains across her window, before sinking to her knees, and wrapping her arms around Victor as his trembling started anew.
She pressed his blonde head into her neck and and gingerly ran her hands down his back, checking for injuries, wary to cause him any more hurt.
"Mom's in the hospital again," he supplied muffled against her neck.
"Did he-" she began, but he shook his head furiously against her neck, and she heard him sniffle back any tears.
"It's the cancer this time, the radiation didn't work," he said, his voice cracking, and that night they didn't crawl into bed and hold each other, only leaned against the wall as wept together in anticipation of his mother's impending death.
Victor didn't come back that night, even though she had gotten the supplies they would need from the local drug store earlier. She waited up for him with her living room light on, but eventually had to call it a night and tried to sleep before her shift.
The next three days passed, leaving her to chew on her fingernails in anxiousness and stare out the window of the break room, looking out into the city, wondering and sending prayers his way.
As her shift ended, Sophie walked out of the ER head down, listening as people discussed Mayor James' television announcement that the Arkham District was to be refurbished and re-opened. Sophie shuddered, remembering her nursing class doing a walk-through of the abandoned facility's medical unit. 'These conditions were deplorable and unacceptable for both patients and medical staff, unsafe for everyone,' Sophie remembered her instructor saying as the class moved through, fearfully eyeing the surgical tables, beds and gurneys with their four point restraints, the dirty straight jackets still hanging on some walls.
Sophie walked fast to her apartment, and when she climbed the steps up to her building, she noticed Victor leaning against the wall by the panel listing the occupants last names.
"Hello," she said dumbly, stopping and blinking at him.
He inclined his head, but said nothing, so she moved forward and pressed in her code, mindful of his eyes on her and the movement of her fingers before the buzz rang and they went in. They took the elevator up together in silence and he followed her to apartment. Inside he slid off his jacket and neatly folded it in half before draping it over her couch. With deft hands, he removed his cell phone from the jacket's inner pocket and slipped it into his slacks with a brief glance. Sophie stood leaning against the front door and slipping off her shoes before moving any farther into the apartment and throwing her shoes into the front closet.
"Help yourself to any food," she said awkwardly, as she watched him begin to unbutton his shirt and move towards the kitchen. "I'm gonna go shower," she mumbled, moving to the bedroom, looking over her shoulder as he opened her fridge and peered in disinterestedly.
Sophie moved to flutter about her room, sexy pajamas, regular pajamas...but definite pajamas were in order, and did she even own sexy pajamas? Running into the bathroom and closing the door behind her, she started the shower and jumped in.
The cold water turned warm and pelted her shoulders, and she gave in to the relaxing warmth. She was soaping up her hair after shaving her legs when she heard the door open, and paused. Just as she was about to peek her head around the opaque curtain, the other side opened behind her and in he stepped.
He was pretty magnificent, if she said so herself. The definition of his muscles was stark against her white shower, and her eyes were drawn to among other things the incision on his chest. The stitches had been removed and instead a scab was in it's place, the skin pink but approximated, it was healing nicely. Glancing down at the wound on his thigh, she found that sutures had been used to close a much smaller incision than the last time she'd seen it. Then her eyes saw the tallies, covering the left pectoral. Sophie moved forward and touched them, though the raised scars were jagged in certain spots, some were clean lines in an a very clear, organized pattern of tallies.
She ran her fingers over them, counting, and her eyes flickered up to his questioning. His eyes were impossibly dark as he looked down at her, studied as her fingertips gently grazed three new tallies above his left nipple. Twenty-nine, she counted, and stepped back, turning from him and what those marks could mean.
Sophie felt his eyes on her as she scrubbed the soap from her hair, felt him moving behind her as he grabbed the soap and cleaned himself. They switched places under the shower head seamlessly, and glancing at him once more, she slipped out of the shower and grabbed a towel for herself, before grabbing one for him, but staring at its fluffy beige material in silence.
Moments later the shower turned off and the curtain opened, and he stood there, arms crossed and uncovered. Her lust was still there, burning its evidence across her cheekbones, but as she looked up at him through the wet tangles of her hair, she made no move to act on it, eyes flickering up over dark golden curls to the tallies on his muscular chest, smooth as the head on his shoulders. Sophie fought tears, fighting a disappoint welling in her, her mind still going back to that boy who had tapped on her window and asked if he could hide inside from his dad.
Sophie held out the towel, and after a moment he took it, but his other hand had snaked out and grabbed the hand that offered it, as her other hand clutched her own towel around her.
"I was charged for my father's murder as a man because I caved in his skull and stabbed him seventy-two times with my mother's kitchen knife," Victor said as emotionlessly as if he was telling her the weather outside. "I was placed in Blackgate Penitentiary with rapists and murderers. I killed my cell mate and had inadvertently killed someone who had been troublesome to Don Carmine Falcone. I was welcomed into the fold, and after further proving my worth to him, the Don hired a lawyer who helped absolve me of my father's murder in self-defense, and for the inmates I killed, I got credit for time served. At twenty I emerged from Blackgate a new man, the boy you knew did not come back out again, Sophie Summers. Don Falcone put a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and unleashed me on the world in his name, to pay my debt for his kindness. I am good at what I do, I enjoy what I do, and I am not ashamed to be what I am."
Sophie felt the hot tears on her face, and nodded, trying to pull her hand from his firm grasp. Victor emerged from the shower, and stood in front of her. He placed her hand on his chest, the right side and then moved to brush her hair back from her face, and trailed rough fingers down her neck to her shoulder.
"Don't cry, Sophie," he rumbled, "I hate your tears,"
'Don't cry Sophie, it'll be okay. This is the way it's always been'.
"You are as beautiful me as you were when you leaned out your window and saved me," he continued, bending his head down to her.
"I couldn't save you," she whispered, eyes raising to his lips, "I didn't save you,"
Then his lips were on hers, tender at first as she remembered, and then demanding and searing. His hands pulled away her towel and trailed over her body, over her breasts and down her ribs to her belly, the curve of her hipbones. A noise rumbled up from his throat and he moved quickly, bending to put her hips against his left shoulder and standing with her over his shoulder and striding quickly out of the bathroom to her bed. Before Sophie knew it she was being laid across it and he was moving over her, with a strange gentleness, but firm intent. Her fingers moved to trace over his hairless brow, trace the structures of his face, the jumping of muscles in his jaw and neck as he bent over her and ran his teeth along her neck, across her collarbone and lower.
Sophie gasped as she felt his teeth, felt his fingers moving over her hips, tracing her curves, cupping her bottom as she lifted her hips to his, biting her lip with a moan.
She felt him situate between her thighs, and when she looked up at him, she saw the man that had stared out at her from behind his bruised eyes that night outside her window.
"Victor, she breathed, "Kiss me again,"
He obliged, and Sophie spiraled into pleasure. When his mouth wasn't on hers, she was placing kisses to his sweat dotted brow, languishing in the feeling of his forehead against her collarbone, the puffs air that marked his groans as he breathed against her breast, the startling sharpness of his teeth.
He felt impossibly right, and Sophie never knew that sex could be so amazing and world turning. When her world exploded in stars, and she heard him roar a shout into the pillow next to her head, she closed her eyes to treasure the moment. Victor Zsasz was her childhood love, her girlhood crush, her first kiss, a lover in only her dreams up to this point. Sophie wondered if she could be his destiny.
Some time later found them under her white comforter, her head on the right side of his chest and his arm wrapped loosely behind her neck.
"Which one is he?" she finally worked up the courage to ask.
He was still underneath her cheek for a few minutes, before his left hand came over and his middle finger hovered above a jagged incision just to the left of his sternum. Sophie ran her own finger over it for a moment, and then pressed a kiss to her finger and then pressed the tip to the scar. Before his hand fell away, she grabbed at his hand and studied the black skull ring on his finger. She hadn't paid it much mind, but it was an ever present darkness on his hand. It was a menacing bauble, but it seemed to suit his long fingers, the roundness of his knuckles. He left her fingers intertwine with his own as she liked, before she relinquished her grip and drifted off to sleep.
Although his chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, it was rare for him to sleep, so Victor stared at Sophie's ceiling in silence, acutely aware of her body spooned against the length of his.
How many times had his teenage self dreamed of this? That person was long dead to him, so he no longer recalled, but he was left with a feeling of familiarity from something he had never experienced before with Sophie. He recalled that he had often visualized them married at some point when he was younger and stupid. He would be running Zsasz Refrigeration and Sophie would run the register and there would always be smiles and laughter and no crying or screaming behind closed doors. Victor's loathing for that young man and his idyllic daydreams was murderously intense. To only aim to be an appliance handy-man, how pathetic, but he knew that it had once been a very real wish of his, and he had hazy memories of he and Sophie playing amongst the refridgerator parts and pieces in his backyard and acting out just that.
His phone buzzed on the side table to his left, and he reached out and grabbed it, bringing it up to his face to recognized the number and the read the message there. Swiftly he untangled himself from Sophie's soft limbs and slid from the bed. He dressed in silence and straightened his attire in front of the mirror, his skull ring flashing in the moonlight that filtered through a window. Tucking his phone into his pocket, Victor found a fast food brochure under a magnet on her fridge and finding a pen in her purse on the counter, he wrote a quick note and left it there before slipping out the door.
I require a key. -V