Chapter 13
Sophie is rocking against Victor, her fingernails digging into his shoulders as his teeth are at her breast when she hears the knock at the door. She pauses, but he presses his fingertips against the small of her back, encouraging her on, and her heart flutters as she regains their rhythm. Victor rumbles in appreciation, and soon he has a vice like grip on her hips as his body strains and contorts in release.
The knocking comes again and a deadly anger passes over his face as he lifts her off him and onto the bed. He grabs the gun he keeps on the nightstand and walks naked as the day he was born out of the bedroom and towards the door.
Sophie scrambles to find her black silk robe and ties it around her waist snuggly, before racing after him. Victor has finished looking through the peephole when she arrives and is turning, muttering under his breath as he heads back to the room, finger twitching against the trigger of his gun.
Sophie peers through the hole and then unlocks the door, opening it with a grim, irritated look on her face.
The mafiosi on the other side gape like fish with eyes bulging at her short robe, but in the darkness of their home and the night, Sophie knows there really isn't much to see other than the paleness of skin.
"What?" she snaps, and realizes that Victor's habits and mannerisms have begun to rub off on her. She can hardly tolerate the stupidness of people without throttling them mentally.
"S-s-sorry, Mrs. Zsasz," one stutters, and gets promptly elbowed by the other.
"Miss Sophie," the other one corrects,"we'be been unable to get ahold of Zsasz. Penguin has a job for him."
Vaguely she recalls that they may have ignored some phone buzzing when their night began. When her eyes flicker to look around the door, she sees Victor is already suited up and headed her way.
"I'll be killing you later," he tells the two men at their door, who look from him to her with utter fear on their faces, but Sophie only cares about the look he gives her as he leaves and closes the door behind them.
Sophie is at the clinic noting her stock of supplies twenty-four hours later when he comes through the clinic door, a strain to his face, almost unrecognizable under his rage.
He is ominously silent as she removes the holster from his chest, notes the gunpowder over his black sweater, and the obvious bullet hole in his left shoulder.
Sophie cuts the sweater away once she gets him to sit on top of the surgical table, and notes with a prayer of thanks that the bullet went right through and that the wound is a clean one.
"Will we be adding new marks today?" she asks to get him to open up.
With his right hand he slams his fist onto the table, and Sophie's only response is to blink before going back to cleansing the wound.
"I failed," he seethes and Sophie decides silence is probably the best course of action.
"Gordon and his stooges showed up," he starts, then he's silent again, but for the terrible grinding of his teeth.
As she sews him up, Sophie wishes she could convey that he has never been, nor will he ever be a failure in her eyes. When she tapes the gauze dressing over his new wound, he is pushing off the table and away from her.
There's a look in his eye, in the way he doesn't actually look at her that tells her his rage is at himself, but...he's probably thinking she's made him weak, and to be honest, she knows that he's changed, but she doesn't think he is in any way weaker.
Her words will only anger him further, so instead she goes to the closet and retrieves the button down shirt from the suit she keeps in there for him. His eyes narrow when she hands him the shirt, and to preserve his pride, she doesn't even offer to help him put it on.
"Penguin will be upset about this," he warns when he finishes buttoning up the shirt.
Sophie waves her hand, "I'll be fine, just...be careful. You can handle him or anyone else if you need to."
He blinks at her and she at him, realizing that while her confidence in him is unfailing, her words and opinion could cause them alot of trouble. They leave the clinic together, drive home in silence and he drops her off before going to Penguin with his failure.
She wants to touch his face, shower him with kisses, but his muscles are coiled and ready to strike, so instead she settles with a squeeze to his knee and one kiss to the corner of his grim set mouth before she leaves the car.
Soon word is going around via texts and phone calls. Oswald's mother is dead, and Theodore Galavan, Gotham's newest "hero" and mayoral candidate is responsible. The fallout of this, Sophie realizes with a sinking feeling, will be terrible.
She's finally fallen asleep alone in bed when the phone in her hand buzzes. Sophie studies it for a few minutes, uncomprehending. Then she is moving and getting dressed in some nondescript clothing, shoving her shock of hair under a knit cap and heading out the door. A vague text from Victor veils a directive to go to her apartment, which she follows unquestioningly. Her work phone she leaves on the nightstand, turned off.
Sophie walks and jogs intermittently, taking winding, convoluted paths before she eventually takes a bus back to her apartment. When she walks in the door, her once-home is a foreign place to her. She feels as if she is intruding into someone else's apartment, but the things that are there are hers, old Sophie's. Sophie keeps her Victor phone on and close to her heart.
The news begins to make Sophie anxious. The new police commissioner Barnes has started a task force geared to take down the corruption in Gotham. A noble cause, Sophie supposes, but their intended target is Penguin for his attempts on the lives of Galavan and Randall. Victor 's face is splashed across the screen, warning of his dangerous nature, and noting that he killed several people in the attempt on Hobbs' life. Admittedly, Sophie is kind of surprised Detective Gordon hasn't come knocking on her door again, but figures so much has been happening, he may not even remember her, and Sophie realizes that a significant amount of time has passed since he visited.
Criminals against criminals, Sophie thinks as she chews on her thumbnail, the light of the screen flickering over her face. Who are the good guys anymore? Even the politicians who stand behind a podium and lecture about morals, their love for the city and their need to improve it are just working secretly to drive that city into the ground.
Why can't anyone just be honest, she thinks. Come out and say, I'm a kingpin of crime, and with the state of the world, it probably wouldn't cause that big of a wave, people would just do what they always do, choose the lesser of the evils. The evil that you know is sometimes, but not always, safer than the evil you do not, Sophie notes when Galavan's mayoral bid is replayed. She looks at his slicked back hair and his earnest expression, but his eyes are hungry, much like Fish Mooney's eyes were hungry. What evil do you hold in store for us, Sophie thinks, and she is more afraid of him than the killer she shares her bed with, of whom she actually has no fear of, or the killer said lover works for, whom she is more cautionary of than afraid.
The cops are killers or on the payroll for killers, who are the payroll of another killer and so on...Sophie surmises that heroes have probably only ever been a thing of fiction, of lesser evils. No one is truly a hero, there were never such a things as good guys in the world.
Sophie doesn't hear from Victor for days, and then a week. As that next week begins to stretch on, her nerves start fraying. Is he laying low, escaping Penguin's anger and Galavan's campaign? Or has he been punished and wounded? Either way communication with him would surely just put him in more jeopardy, so she remains radio silent until she hears from him first.
Sophie lays in bed with tears trickling out of the corner of her eyes, feeling sick. Once again she has let him down with her inability to do anything useful. She wishes she had some idea of what to do, instead of just remembering his form climbing through her window, his arm at an odd angle.
The days run together, and she loses track of time. Sophie has no work to bury herself in to keep herself distracted and she hates the monotony, the fear, the absence of him which she feels the deepest, which haunts her the most.
She begins to take walks, runs, trying to catch a glimpse of Doctor Rome outside of Gotham General, seeing if maybe a black car comes to pick him up, something. Yet Sophie doesn't see the good doctor at all on her passes, regardless of the time of day.
It is a Wednesday, and an uncommonly hot night during a Gotham summer when she realizes she is being followed, when she is attacked.
Sophie is jogging back to her apartment when she sees men she doesn't know, but immediately they strike her as mafia at the front door of her apartment, arguing, pointing at the nameplates by the door. Sophie lowers her head and keeps on jogging, trying not to drastically increase her pace.
She is making another circuit around the neighborhood when she catches the reflection of different men in the glass window of her old coffee shop. She is being followed,. this is not the first window she has seen their reflections in.
When Sophie looks around to assess her other routes, she notices that the men she had seen in front of her apartment are now headed her way, and she is being sandwiched in.
There are children playing in the water spray of a broken pipe across the street. Are they safe when they go home, Sophie randomly wonders, are they happy and loved?
Sophie ducks quickly into the coffee shop, and pulls her cellphone from her sports bra.
Sophie hits the send button on her text, and then exits the coffee shop, mindful of her shadows and the squeal of children as she goes down her only alternate route, an alley next to the coffee shop.
The men that had been at her apartment pass by the alley, just passerbys. But the men who have been following her continue along her path. They've seen the diamonds in her ears, around her neck. They want money, and Sophie realizes she has gauged this all wrong, and yet, not in complete error; the end will be the same.
When her head hits the cement, she thinks of his whisper, I am Victor Zsasz, and her heart is happy.
She isn't at her apartment when he goes to retrieve her. His phone calls aren't returned. Victor has been thinking the made life is no longer for him, too many constraints. His talents aren't being utilized to the fullest extent. And the volatile nature of his boss put him in the dangerous and precarious position of losing his temper, badly.
His irritation turns to anger when he can't find her. Has she run from him when she got the chance, the thought crosses his mind, but he quickly eliminates it.
It is his least favorite option, but also his last when he walks through the doors of Gotham General and heads to her old unit.
Victor dwells in the shadows, studying faces when he sees a woman he'd seen Sophie conversing with back at Mooney's, and outside of the hospital on occasion.
He grabs her arm and pulls her aside, "I'm looking for Sophie Summers," he growls, trying to remain even keeled. The woman is just about to exclaim for help, when she falters at his words, and then looks up at him, hard.
She's an older woman, and her face is lined with not just age, but the things she's seen come through her doors.
"You're that man of hers, aren't you?" she finally asks, and when she doesn't fight his grip, he lets go of her, progress is being made.
"I've been unable to get into contact with her," he says vaguely.
"Why weren't you with her?" the woman asks, angry, eyes getting wet, face red.
"My job pulled me away until recently, I just got back into town," Victor explains, and he hates explaining himself to someone so lowly.
The anger doesn't leave her face, "Was your number the one in her phone?" she asks.
Victor is losing his patience, "Do you know where she is, or not?" he snaps.
The woman looks torn, before she heads to the unit desk, Victor her angry shadow.
"I'm stepping off the unit, be back in a few minutes," she tells the unit secretary, and then she is leading Victor out of the emergency room to the intensive care unit. There she speaks to a nurse at the desk who looks at Victor, and then at his escort before nodding. They enter a room at the back of the unit that smells like decay and is filled with the hum of a machine.
Victor doesn't understand why he has been brought here and his anger is turning to rage. The figure on the bed is bruised and swollen, and the hum of the machine is a ventilator that is connected to tubing in her mouth.
"She was found in an alley behind that coffee shop she loved. They ripped the earrings out of her ears, necklace off her neck. They shot her, but….that didn't kill her like they probably thought it would...just...left her without oxygen to her brain," the woman ended with a tight voice, and then she sobbed. "Sometimes, her eyes open, but she doesn't track...and all the tests show that …. it's just the machines now. She has no family, no one for us to contact to ask about her wishes. We are going to withdraw care soon," the woman ended.
Quickly the woman is touching the patient's hand and then retreating from the room, hand to her mouth.
Victor eyes the machines, the numbers on the screens that supposedly indicate life. He prowls closer, investigating each one, before he makes it to the side of the bed, and finally looks upon her.
There is a void in his chest, a black hole that is rupturing and causing fissures throughout his being, he is being consumed.
Half her head has been shaved, and bandages are wrapped around the length of her swollen head, but especially heavy on the right side of her face, and bruises look like purple-black paint has been poured down her face.
Delicate fingers are taped together or in splints. Her ears are also covered with dressings, and her chest rises and falls with the timing of the machine to her left.
Bruising around her ivory neck, and her eyelids are fluttering. Her emerald eyes are a sight against the burst blood vessels in her eyes, like some horrific version of Christmas colors.
Victor finds that his fingers are touching the back of her hand, and then reaching up to touch her chin. A mugging, a robbery has taken his Sophie.
What had she thought of when it happened? Victor's muscles can't decide between jumping erratically underneath his skin, or going so utterly still that they feel like they will rip from the strain. With a gentle touch he lifts a flaccid wrist and eyes her admit bracelet. His brain whirls and he thinks of a text he'd received.
How long does he stare at her face? She is sleeping, that is the face she makes as she rests. Yet, there she is, simply a prisoner of her flesh, the living dead.
"Sophie," he begins, "Sophie."
That void within his chest is becoming a maw of unfathomable rage. With nimble fingers, he unplugs the machines, disconnects tubing.
Alarms are sounding, those signs of life wailing in a last cry.
The nurse who had been at the desk rushes in and when she goes to call for help, Victor snaps her neck and lets her body fall to the floor as he continues to disconnect his Sophie.
Then his arms are lifting her and he is whisking her away and out of the hospital, to back doors and stairs, and into the car he had taken to get there. Then up to her apartment where he slides her body between white, white sheets.
His Sophie, always surrounded in white.
Her chest is seizing, and sounds are coming from within her that would make a lesser someone wretch. He sits next to her, one hand on hers, and the other touching her cheek as it cools.
When he is satisfied that her image has been carved into his brain sufficiently, he rises. Sophie is sleeping. She is now in a place that he cannot follow her to. There will be no more scaling of walls, no more crawling through windows.
There will be no more slipping between white sheets, no more infuriating back talk, no more green eyes flashing at him. There will be no more little hands upon and within his own. No more beating heart under that breast.
There is a quickness and mindfulness to his movements as Victor turns her apartment building and its residents to ash. Fire really has never been his weapon of choice, but he remembers books describing funeral pyres of figures larger than life. There was an ancient East Indian practice called sati where a widow would cast herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband, but Victor has too much to do to endure the flames with her now. So instead, he sacrifices the lives of all the souls in the building as her accompaniment into death, as a payment to any kind of deity that would take their lives, if only to give hers back. Yet, Victor determines, even Death would find Sophie to be succulent and be unwilling to relinquish her.
Later, when the total death count is revealed in the news, Victor begins his tallies in a dingy bathroom of a place that is utterly disgusting in its conditions.
Her tally is just one of many, but it is the one that hurts the most, and slices him deepest.
'I love you, Victor Zsasz', her text had said, 'I love you, Victor Zsasz'.
It haunts him, this man with no guilt, no regrets. It sunders his connection to reality, to the world, to his specie. He is not only a creature of the dark, he is the dark.