Soooooooo long since I updated! Sorry all, I've been having a baby and all sorts. But I have always had an ending in mind (this story actually began with its ending in my head and grew backwards!) so I had an hour or two tonight and I wanted to finish the last chapter I started, and hopefuly this will kick my arse to finish this in another few chapters! Anyone still here - THANK YOU! Enjoy...
The night train is a shaft of trembling light shaking through the midnight countryside. Shuttling south from Amsterdam, it is pulled by a powerful electric-powered locomotive; but the carriages are old stock, the antique European style with separate compartments with curtained doors and rusting luggage racks. The train is half empty, and when the girl cries out for help, nobody comes.
The man leans back against the inside of the compartment door, laughing as she scrabbles helplessly at the handle, then casually backhands her to the floor. Unsteady on her feet already, the goes down like a sack of flour, her head lolling against the seat, her thick brown bangs falling back to reveal her terrified green eyes. He enjoys her fear a moment more, then gets down to the business in hand, reaches out to tear open her blouse. She shrinks away, skitters backwards towards the window, holding up her hands – in defense or supplication isn't clear.
"You don't have to do this," she says, and although her eyes are wild with fear, her voice is surprisingly calm. "I won't raise the alarm, I won't tell anyone. Just walk away."
He laughs, incredulous, cruel. They always do this, the little sluts. Think they can talk him round. Think they can bargain. When he can just take what he wants from them. Some of them even play along, hoping he won't hurt them. Stupid whores. They don't understand, it's the taking that's the whole point. He always finds something to take they aren't willing to give in the end. With this one, it won't even be that that hard.
Again he reached for her; she came staggering to her feet and put out a hand to forestall him. This time, her voice is hard, all trace of fear gone from her eyes.
"Stop. I'm warning you. Walk away."
He's irritated now, jerks her towards him with an oath – then reels back as she punches him hard in the mouth. Maddened by the pain and shock, he hits her back, knocks her down onto the floor of the rolling carriage. He touches his mouth, tastes his own blood.
"Stront! Kreng!" Enraged, he spits into her face.
Her pupils contract, and with deliberation, she licks his bloody spittle from her lips. He has a second to register confusion – and then she is on him, her legs locked round his waist, her arms wrapped round his shoulders in a parody of a lovers' embrace – and her teeth in his neck.
Madeline tears a messy wound in his throat, hears the gurgling sound of his scream as the first hot draught of blood flows into her, her teeth already lengthening as she bites again, straight into the vein. After that she hears nothing but the thudding of his heart, the flood of his memories overwhelming her, the thud as they tumble down together onto the carriage floor, down, down, down into his death together.
The sound of the train's whistle as it shoots a tunnel pulls her back to herself, lying beneath the body of her ertstwhile attacker, the stench of his death filling her nostrils. She shoulders the big man off as if he weighed nothing, cocks her head to listen, to see if any notice had been attracted to them by his scream, by the animal noises she knows from experience would have accompanied her feeding. Nothing. She rolls the stiff window down with one hand, and with the other, lifts the corpse by the back of his shirt and hefts him out into the enveloping blackness of the night.
She thrusts her head out after him, turning her red-eyed face into the rushing wind, letting the scent of hay and manure and damp vegetation flood her in a wave of sensation; in spite of herself, a little glad laugh escapes her lips. This is always the best moment – second only to the blood itself. The thrill of it still coursing through her, transforming her, transforming the world and her experience of it. This little bit of time before the guilt sets in, the horror. She has learned over time not to begrudge it herself, but to treasure it. It will be all she has.
Apart from these snatched moments of pleasure, all she has had for the best part of ten years is guilt, fear and self-disgust, the weight of bodies slipping from her hands into black waters.
It started very soon after she left Jessie at her old family home – humiliatingly soon. She would have thought, looking back, that her self-disgust at what she had done to her sister – what she had almost done – would have kept her from temptation for a year or so at least. But in just a handful of months of lonely, drifting directionlessness - too ashamed to go back to the mansion and too heartbroken to forge ahead on her own – the one thing she became more and more certain of was the memory of the blood, of taking and taking without having to stop, and the knowledge that it was the only true peace that she had ever known. And the temptation to know it again.
She fought it; she tried. Tried every mental exercise Charles had taught her to control the yearning; channeled her memories of Erik's iron will to try and emulate it; tormented herself with the memory of Jessica lying limp and ravaged, close to death, in her arms, her sister's life's blood still hot in her face. But after waking in a sweat after yet another nightmarishly blissful blood dream, she had found herself leaving her motel in the small hours, roaming the backstreets of New York not knowing what she was looking for until it found her – evil.
"Well well well, what are you doin' out here all alone, darlin'?"
The reek of whisky on his breath, his rough hands on her shoulders. She had struggled on instinct, and he had slapped her to the floor, unbuckling already as he leant over her. As he pressed his weight on her, holding her down, he presented his throat to her, and before she had even decided to do it, she had bitten messily into his vein.
At first it was horrible, ugly, too real, his loud cursing, his sudden frenzied struggle to be free, the blood spurting messily onto her t-shirt, the pain in her arms and legs as he thrashed to release himself. But then, the red velvet curtain of bliss had descended on her, her limbs filling with heavy, leonine power, and his body fit to hers like an overgrown baby's as she held him to her lips and drank and drank and drank.
His ugly little life flowed into her, all violent pain and violent pleasures, the first time he had taken a woman and realised that she couldn't stop him, that none of them could stop him, the prowling round the streets at night looking for the drunk, the helpless, the naively trusting, always so much better than whores, to find it laid out like that and to take it-
But all of that slid by like silt on a river bed, under a pounding stream of pure bliss, an insistent flow of peace and pleasure soothing over the ache of loneliness, the sting of guilt, the gaping wounds of loss. His pulse merged into hers and she could feel her suffering dwindle to a laughable nothing, caught like a twig in the relentless rolling delight that built and built and then whirled down to darkness as his struggling heartbeat faded and fell still.
She came back to herself lying half on top of his body in the alleyway, the reek of his death rising up around her but curiously far away. She had leapt up in horror, and felt once more the rolling power in her limbs, the limitless acuity of her senses, the thrilling of her blood transformed by his. She didn't even stop to hide the corpse. She ran, not even trying to hold herself in check, was halfway to New Jersey before she felt the need to even pause. She had left the country before the dawn broke, boarding the first flight out of JFK, still so high she wasn't even sure where she was going until they touched down in Copenhagen.
And since then she had drifted from place to place, and fallen again and again from her vow that this life taken was the last. She tried to bargain with herself; she had her rules. Never the innocent, that was a rule. She waited for trouble to find her, put herself into harm's way, to let her victims choose her rather than the other way around – it seemed fitting somehow. Except for that first clumsy kill, she always gave them the chance to save themselves – to relent, to have mercy on her, their supposed victim – before she struck. It was rarely taken. And she always waited as long as she could, waited months at a time, sometimes almost a year, sometimes so long she really believed she might be able to resist the urge. But in the end, it was always the same.
It was only when she finally accepted that fact, that she would kill again, always, that she had been able to find some measure of peace, some small accommodation with herself. She had finally been able to settle, had lived in Venice for the last two and a half years – partly because its timeless, black-and-gold beauty soothed her soul, and partly because its shadowy colonnades and deep, forgiving waters were the perfect hunting ground, yielded a sufficient supply of dangerous types who couldn't resist the apparently easy prey she seemed, passing with quick, nervous steps through the campos at night, stepping into a darkened passegio as if unwitting of what waited in its depths. She had been happy there, in her own way. She had a home, a little job, a routine. And then Paris. Erik. And all of this. And now here she was again, exhilarated, horrified, the taste of blood in her mouth.
She was too wired to sit back down, to act normally for the remainder of her journey. She prowled the corridor of the train, her attenuated hearing picking up little wisps of conversation in a babel of languages as she passed the curtained compartments. She reached the door of the drivers' carriage and looked out of the window as their destination dissolved out of the grey dawn like a cool, grey cloud, the quiet, prosperous city of Dusseldorf.
As she stepped down onto the platform, she slipped on her sunglasses, despite the light mist hanging over the station – better to look eccentric than for anyone to notice her carmine eyes. She weaved her way through the streets, with no clear destination in mind – just the certainty that sooner or later, when everything had gone to hell, this is where he would have come. Back to the beginning.
She spent most of the day roaming aimlessly, stopped to sit in a smoky cafe-bar, not drinking the cup of coffee she had bought out of habit, wondering if she had been stupid to come here, if it had been a mistake. Maybe he had never come here after all; and if he had, it was a big city. She knew nothing about his home here, which street he had lived on even. She could walk these streets for weeks and never find Eri-
There. That smell. Lemon and leather.
She set the silver spoon she had been idly toying with down in her saucer with a clatter, snatched up a newspaper in a language she couldn't even read to hide her face, and peered over the top of it as Erik walked straight past the window of the café, walking with his usual air of intent, looking so much like he had when she saw him last she wondered if he was real, or just a fantasy brought on by expectation. But no; his scent. She couldn't have imagined that, not so clear, so exact. She rose in a daze, absently dropped some Deutschmarks onto the table and left the café, following his trail.
She got sight of him again a few streets away. He was wearing a battered leather jacket and a homburg hat, pulled low over his eyes, a brown paper bag under each arm. He had grown a beard, and he moved with his head down, meeting no-ones eye. She supposed he had to, now. After all, he was headline news – he and the blue woman he had fought with, The Hero as she was already being labeled (much to her own chagrin). So what did that make Erik then? The villain? She wondered if he wondered, if he cared.
She noticed, discomfited slightly, how instinctively she had fallen into predatory mode as she pursued him through the streets – her loose-limbed, light-footed pace, her intent, the way her nose had locked on to his scent. She didn't want his blood though, and that too didn't surprise her. Over the years, she had encountered them from time to time – the people who just didn't have that rich, raw appeal that human blood exerted on her in this state. Mutants, she had come to realize, whether they knew it or not. It gave her a kind of sick comfort to know she had never killed her own kind. But really, when you are knee deep in blood, does it make any difference whose blood it is? She shook her head to clear the errant thought, came to herself just in time to watch him come to a halt outside a closed restaurant, dart his eyes from side to side, and then, reassured that he wasn't being observed, make a small gesture with his shoulder. She heard the lock click and the latch turn, watched as he shouldered the door open and carried his bags inside the darkened restaurant, kicking the door shut behind him.
She was standing in the shadow of a nearby church, watching him through the creamy net curtains that hung over half the windows. He set the brown bags down on the spotted, curved copper bar, unpacked a few groceries – and a couple of small bottles of whiskey. She watched as he sat down at one of the round, dusty wooden tables that dotted the bar area, snapped open the first bottle, and begin to drink. She watched for a while, until the first bottle was gone.
She looked up at the sagging awning of the building; Chaim's, it read in faded, curling script. His uncle's restaurant, she realised. The one he was supposed to inherit. How he must be feeling to be drawn back here, after everything that he'd been through – after everything he had done.
She watched him as the sky darkened above her; he reached for the second bottle. And as she watched, her bewilderment and anger worked within her, forcing her past her indecision. She hadn't been sure before now why she was looking for him, or what she would do if she found him. But if there was one thing the blood helped with, it was clarity. She knew now that more than anything, she wanted to ask Erik how he could have done the things he had, to the people he had most reason to love. She wanted an explanation.
It was dark in the bar now, Erik realised. He should probably get up and light the lamps, he thought blurrily, then laughed to himself. He hardly needed to get up, did he? He clicked his fingers clumsily, theatrically, and the copper switches in the bases of all the bar lamps leapt, flooding the room with dusty amber light that bounced off the gleaming surface of the half empty bottle in front of him, wobbled on the syrupy surface of its contents as he took another burning swig.
It didn't seem to be helping, the drinking. But it didn't hurt either, he supposed. It couldn't seem to block out the memories, or the pain. But it did somehow depersonalize it, set it back at a distance from him. Until he fell asleep, of course. This was the balancing act; he couldn't sleep any more without the drinking. But drink too little, and his rest would be riven by horrible, graphic dreams, ones he couldn't struggle free of, ones that left him drenched in sweat and unable to stop shaking when he woke.
The guards trying to drag him from his cell, fighting them off, the battering of plastic batons, plastic knuckledusters, the strain of his power reaching for metal and finding only the metal plate in his own head, the searing pain-
Trask behind the glass panel at the Pentagon, telling him again that Sean was dead, that Raven was dead, that Azazel was dead, that their child was dead, that Erik had no-one left to protect, that he might as well just tell them what he knew, that he might as well co-operate to save himself all of this suffering. The anger that he was lying; the terror that he might be telling the truth. That bright, white, bare room, minutes, hours, days and years all rolled into one, the feeling of the lump of metal in his head holding his skull together and tearing his mind apart. Trask telling him that Angel was dead. That Emma was dead. The photographs slid through his meal hatch – his friends, his brothers and sisters, their staring eyes, their cold, scarred faces-
That elevator door pulling back to reveal Charles, that rush of elation – and then the hatred twisting Charles's face-
Raven pleading for him to stop as he forced the bullet towards her, the burning in his skull as he did it, knowing that this was the only way to stop all those deaths, to prevent their extinction, to make everything he'd suffered mean SOMETHING - but not being sure even as the bullet buried itself in the flesh of her calf if he could ever go through with it, if he could do that to her, if he could do that to Charles-
No. He couldn't face the nightmares, not again. He had to be sure of oblivion, he had to drink until he passed out if he wanted to be sure his demons wouldn't find him in the night. He picked up the bottle again with something like purpose, was raising it to his lips when he heard the bell over the front door tinkle half-heartedly.
He lurched to his feet, knocking over the chair, bottle in one hand and the other raised up to catch the crowbar which flew to him from its hiding place under the bar. The stranger stepped out of the shadows, and removed the dark glasses covering her face. She had a long, black braid hanging over one shoulder, and ruby eyes.
"Madeline? Mein Gott, is that really you?"
The adrenaline subsided slightly, curdled sickly in his gut with the alcohol. He lowered the crowbar, took a step towards her. She stopped, stepped back, suddenly wary. He stopped too, confused, then essayed a tight smile.
"It's good to see you. But you shouldn't have come here. How did you find me?"
Her eyes darken at this, and as if making a decision at last, she strides swiftly towards him and hits him – hits him hard – across the face. He rocks back on his heels, a combination of the booze and her unexpected strength taking him by surprise. He drops the crowbar, cradles his jaw in his hand. He has bitten the inside of his mouth, spits blood onto the floorboards.
"Shiesse! Why do all my long-lost friends want to punch me or brain me or shoot me when we meet again?"
She scowls.
"Maybe it's the way you lose them, Erik."
He shakes his head to clear it– this encounter too seems like a dream, implausible, fuzzy around the edges. He is having trouble gathering his thoughts.
"Maybe it is at that. So what have I done to you, then? Last I knew about it, we were still friends."
He massages his jaw as he right the chair again, straddles it backwards and takes her in, her alabaster skin, her blood red eyes.
"Although I see a lot has changed since then. I'm proud of you, Madeline. It's not easy to make peace with who you are."
Her frown deepens, and those alarming eyes narrow.
"It's been a long time, Erik. You haven't got any idea who I am."
He shakes his head, not knowing what to say; absently takes another pull on the bottle.
He probably ought to be getting angry, he considers. But frankly, this is all too surreal, and anyway, all his anger seemed to evaporate the moment Raven walked away him out in front of the White House, the moment he realised that he had thrown away the last of his allies, burned all of his bridges, and for what? An unfulfilled vengeance, a doom deferred but not destroyed. It was only once it was gone he realised how much he had been relying on that anger to give him a purpose, a reason to go on after everything he'd lost – his love, his friends, his cause, 10 years of his life. He had snatched at Logan's horror story vision of the future, something to care about, something to fight. And he had fought, fought everything and everyone - until he realised that he had lost everything he had been fighting for all along.
"Well, go on then. Tell me what I've done to you."
She steps towards him.
"This isn't about me, Erik, and well you know it. I haven't seen you for ten years and more, and anyway, I'm in no position to expect anything from anybody. But how could you do that to Raven, Erik? She believed in you, she had your back. And you tried to kill her."
He winced. The conversation that had seemed almost whimsical to this point suddenly sharpens and focuses, and he sees Raven's face again, the terror, the betrayal.
"You don't understand. I had to do it, to save us all. All the mutants of the future who would be rounded up and slaughtered because of what they would find if they captured her-"
She interrupts him disgusted.
"Are you still trying to tell yourself that? Erik, she was your friend. You could have tried to find another way. You should have. Charles did."
Charles. Erik felt his powers starting to sensitise, looking for something to fight, looking for the source of this sudden pain. Finding nothing, they turned inward, and a stabbing pain began emanating from the metal plate in his head. He clutched his forehead, suppressed a groan.
"Erik? What's the matter with you?"
Madeline's voice stabbed around the edges of his consciousness as he struggled to get on top of the pain, to control his own powers. When he opened his eyes as the throbbing subsided, he saw her leaning over his chair, suspicion warring with reluctant concern in her eyes.
"It's nothing. It's just… a headache, that's all." She squatted back down on her heels in front of him, looking skeptical.
"Hell of a headache, I'd say. It's the plate, isn't it?"
He looked at her sharply.
"How do you know about that?" But he knew already there could only be one answer to that. 'Raven. You've seen her, spoken to her? How is she? Where is she?"
Madeline scowled again.
"I don't even know if I should tell you that. Isn't that just ridiculous? But she's as well as can be expected. Recovering. With friends."
Charles. That name again, unspoken this time but just as real, just as painful. He pushed the feelings away again, fingers instinctively tightening round the neck of the bottle.
"That's good. She shouldn't be out there on her own. She needs to be protected from people like Trask, for all our sakes."
Madeline rolled her eyes.
"And you realize this now? Just in time for the whole world to be terrified of murderous mutants in frankly ridiculous outfits conducting massacres on live TV? Well better late than never, I suppose. Seriously, if you had been trying to endanger us all, you couldn't have done better. What were you thinking?"
Erik sighed. She wanted answers, she wanted a fight. But he didn't have anything to give her. He thought back to the last time they had met, when he was still so full of fire and faith, and she was just a lovely child coming into the full knowledge of her powers. He remembered how close they had been, how he had trusted her with parts of himself he had only previously trusted to Charles, how he had felt the warmth and the weight of her unsolicited love. How had they ever gotten, he wondered, from that place to this? And then he laughed inwardly, darkly. Step by step. Just as his country had gone from peace and prosperity to madness and murder. Step by step. He raised the bottle to his lips again, but Madeline gripped his wrist surprisingly tight.
"And what is this, Erik? You're drunk. You don't get drunk."
He chuckled.
"You're behind the times, liebchen. I get drunk splendidly these days. If it works for Charles, no reason it can't work for me."
The memory of Charles, the cut-open look on his face as he had snapped "I gave up my powers so that I could sleep" – and then that catch of himself, the bitten lip as he realised that he had said too much.
Even then, with the world gone mad around them and everything between them ashes, all Erik had wanted to do was reach over and take him into his arms. But seeing how broken Charles was – the loss of his powers, the loss of that enthusiastic hope that was his signature, the bottle never far from his fingers – had made Erik furious: with Charles, with himself, with the whole world and everything in it.
As always, his anger had both saved him and unmade him. It had allowed him to carry on, after the shock of being freed from the Pentagon a decade too late. But then it had led to a course of action that had shattered everything, and left him high and dry with nothing but pain and numb regrets. The drinking had been something to fill the hole the anger had left; and in some perverse way, it had been a way of feeling closer to Charles when they had never been further apart – to feel what he had felt, to try to understand how he could have let himself fall so far apart after Erik had left. He tried to fool himself that it helped. But nothing really did.
Madeline was looking at him contemplatively, trying to understand.
"Charles has given up the drinking. Well, the Drinking with a capital 'D' – you now Charles, he still appreciates the finer things… And he's given up the serum, too – but you know that already, I suppose."
Erik's head snapped up, too fast.
"He's given it up? Permanently? I knew he must have taken a break to try and stop me at the White House. But he's stopped? For good?"
She nodded, gave him a long look as she tried to gauge his reaction – then with a sigh, she pulled up a chair to his table and sat down.
Erik gave a short sigh.
"So he can't walk any more. Poor Charles. You know, for a moment there when that door opened in the Pentagon and I saw him standing there – even when he punched me in the face – for just a moment, nothing else mattered. It was as if the world had pressed reset, as if everything had started again."
Madeline prised the bottle out of his unresisting hand, put it to her lips absently, then set it down untasted with a sigh.
"God, I could use that right now," she said regretfully. "I mean I don't want it. Couldn't keep it down if I did drink it. But psychologically, you know, this feels like a conversation that requires a drink. You've got an unfair advantage."
This was close enough to a joke that he gave her a wary smile. Very reluctantly, she smiled back.
"Yes, he's given it up," she continued, twirling the bottle around on its base with a grinding sound. "He's changed, Erik. What happened has changed him. He's found a way to hope again; he's reopening the school – but not just a school, it's more than that now somehow. Everybody's trying to find away forward from what's happened, to try and make the future again. So why are you here, burying yourself in the past?"
Erik shrugged.
"I didn't have anywhere else to go."
She leant across the table, gripped his forearm.
"You need to go home, Erik. Your real home. You need the others to help you find a way forward. There's nothing left for you here. Just ghosts and dust and old wounds."
He shook his head.
"You make it sound so easy. But I can't. I can't go back there, not after everything that's happened. Not after everything I've done. Not after everything that Charles has done… and not done."
He shut his eyes at that, the plate in his skull starting to buzz and the memory of all those times in his ten years of imprisonment, when he thought he was going mad from the loneliness, the helplessness, and he had cried out shamelessly to Charles to hear him, to save him.
"What do you mean, Erik? What Charles has not done?"
"Nothing. I don't want to talk about it."
"Well tough. You owe me, Erik. You owe us all."
Rationally, he knew she was right. But the plate made it so hard to be rational; the constant low-level pain with the bursts of outright agony that accompanied the exercise of his powers made it so difficult to think, to feel anything other than pain, than anger. Trask may never have been able to work out a practical way of torturing Erik for information – various things had been tried, but he was fundamentally stymied by the fact that Erik unconscious wasn't particularly talkative, Erik conscious had the power to kill himself at will by removing the plate from his head, and Erik dead was useless to him. But the plate was torture enough by itself – the plate and the terrible, empty, lonely and purposeless days, months, years in his concrete cell. He banged his fist on the table.
"No I don't. I may have made mistakes, but I didn't abandon my people to suffer and die because of my own weakness. I don't owe Charles anything, not anymore, not after he abandoned me in there."
He'd said too much; Maddy's carmine eyes opened with understanding, with horror.
"You blame him. For leaving you in the Pentagon all those years. For not caring what happened to you in there."
Erik shook his head.
"No. No. I understand why he would have thought he ought to have left me there, why I had to be punished for what I did. The way I fought my war was not something Charles could ever understand, or forgive. I know why he didn't come for me when I was taken."
He dropped his chin to his chest, feeling the confected anger recede and give way to a wave of dreadful pain.
"But I begged him, Madeline. After the first few months, when I realised that Trask had no plan to kill me and no plan to let me go… I reached out for him and I begged him – to save me, or to kill me, whichever mercy he felt I most deserved or even just to talk to me…" He dropped his head onto his steepled hands, trying to get hold of his emotions, trying to still the pain in his skull, trying to remember he was free now, not trapped in that cold white box forever pleading for the sound of Charles's voice in his head and hearing nothing. Free. But what did that even mean any more? Free to do what?
He felt a soft hand on the back of his head, looked up to meet Madeline's horrified gaze.
"He didn't know, Erik. He didn't know. He couldn't have heard you."
Erik shook his head jerkily.
"That's not possible. He knew my mind; and I know how powerful his reach can be when he's attuned to someone. He couldn't not have heard."
She shook her head earnestly.
"The serum, Erik. He was already using the serum before I left. That was only weeks after you were captured. He never heard you asking him for help."
Erik stared at her. For a moment, he was back in the hall outside the sick bay in the Westchester mansion, Maddy trying to convince him that Charles wasn't dead. He was holding his breath, almost willing it not to be true; the despair he had held on to for a decade, for all its pain, was a solid fact he had relied on. Hope. Always hope, pulling the earth out from under him, sending his certainties spinning. But if Charles really hadn't known…
She had always been too good at reading his expression. Seizing on his indecision, she leant forward, gripped his arm. Her hand was hot, hard, stronger than it should have been. Erik's dignity forbade him to pull away, uncomfortably aware he might not be able to do so.
"Come back home with me, Erik. Face up to Raven. Just talk to Charles. I made such a mess of all your lives when I walked into them. Charles says it would have happened anyway, but…" She trailed off and bit her lip, met his eyes pleadingly. "Please. Give me a chance to put things right. At least let me try."
Charles. Raven. Home. The fantasy was so tempting. But it was just that, a fantasy. He shook his head, gently prised her fingers from his forearm.
"No, Madeline. No. You're not the only one who made a mess when you walked in. Charles was doomed the second he pulled me from the sea, and Raven with him. So much suffering, all because of me. They're back together now, back on track. They're safe. I can't jeopardise that just to salve my loneliness - or your guilt, my dear. I'm sorry. Leave me here to my dust and my ghosts. They're all that I deserve."