CONTAINS CONTENT:
Mild language, sensual themes.
{{Unedited}}
Vincent looked to Klara and she nodded at him before he glanced back over the drawings. “Okay, that looks about right,” he said, noting the teleporter that they’d detailed on paper. This was what would take them to other worlds; other dimensions. So intricate, and full of life, and yet Klara looked like she felt stupid.
“I can’t believe that we’ve never figured that out before!” She chortled.
He smiled at her and gave the tie – his tie – around her neck a tug. “It’s in part because you didn’t have me,” he said with a soft smile. “I helped largely on this.” Vincent’s face beamed proudly as he looked over the drawing again. “Chamber would have too, if he had stayed here with all of you.”
She shrugged. “Maybe someday he will be.” She took the drawings back from Vincent. “We’ve been trying to use the radianite to open one way, but failed to realize that some of the formulas and equations might be backwards. How did we miss that?” she wondered aloud as she rubbed her chin and pushed her green beanie back up.
“Each world has a number,” he explained, with a vague gesture. “My world is 954,008,331.”
Her eyes widened, “There really are infinite worlds, aren’t there?” she asked, drumming her bottom lip. Vincent smiled at her, and turned back to his computer screen. “D-does that mean that Cory could come in from another dimension even after we kill him?”
Vincent leaned back for a moment, crossing a knee over the other. “In theory, yes. But I want you to remember something important, Klara, while it’s true that there are doubles of all of us, maybe infinitely, they are not always the same,” he pursed his lips for a moment and shrugged. “Cory could be very different in another dimension if he exists at all.”
“B-but he doesn’t, right?” she asked twisting her fingers together.
“Not to the best of my knowledge. He said that he’d been to many other worlds and he was dead in all of them.”
“How strange that some people are always dead, others are sometimes dead… like Mari-” she cut herself off.
He gave her a forgiving smile, and leaned back toward his computer, opening his own files that he no longer cared if she saw.
“Are you working on a second anchor?” she asked, leaning over his left shoulder.
He nodded. “It’s possible, I just have to be careful how often I teleport, hence this-,” he lifted his hand and pointed to his countdown watch.
“It forces you to stay put for what… thirty seconds?”
“That’s about the slimmest that I can make it. If I try to teleport before that, something is too jumbled up, still, and it can kill me. I got seriously injured the first time that I did that,” he explained. “Nearly tore me apart.”
Klara winced. There was a pause, and then, “Oh!” she said digging into her pocket, “will you give this to Marielle for me later?” she asked. “I know it’s her birthday.” The thing in Klara’s hand was hard to describe. It was a heart, but Klara had made it out of spare mother board parts and something shiny that Vincent couldn’t put a name to in that moment. He smiled and took it from her and put it into his white coat pocket, gingerly patting it.
“Why don’t you give it to her yourself?”
“I have to get out of here. I promised Tayane that I’d take her to a concert tonight. It’s not close, we have a long drive.” Klara said throwing a glance at the clock on the wall.
Vincent gave her a soft smile. “Have fun.” She started to leave, then she whirled back around and dropped his tie back around his neck. He smiled and tightened it back up around his neck.
He turned his attention to the next problem… Sabine. She was pulling items out of a cabinet and he watched her for a moment as she went to her desk where a large wooden crate sat. Setting them inside, she put the lid on top, and taking her brand, she put it to the side burning a snake into the wood. He winced, knowing that symbol well. It was on Austin’s body.
He approached her slowly, and stood behind her for a moment with his hands in his pockets, trying not to think too much about how much she reminded him of Marielle at times; taller and sharper featured, but they really did look related, and his physical attraction to her felt tempting even now.
“What do you want, Vincent?” she sighed, without turning to him.
“We should talk about the spike,” he explained. She didn’t reply. “Are we ever going to talk like normal people?”
“What’s normal, Vincent?” Sabine growled, turning to him finally and removing the goggles from her face. “What?” He was silent, “nothing about this is normal.” She continued to set the lid on the box and secure it. “What’s normal?” She repeated. “You may have helped John and I and I will be forever grateful to some degree, Vincent,-” she paused, focusing on her own words. “-But you will never have me fooled the way you seem to have everyone else fooled.”
“Who’s fooled? And with what?”
“You’re a damned liar!” She barked, turning to him and her eyes burned with that familiar hatred for him. “You’re a liar, and a manipulator, and you don’t have me under your thumb,” she growled. He smiled softly and glanced down, something flickering across his expression that was distant. “Something funny?” she seethed. “Do I amuse you, Vincent?”
He was rubbing his bottom lip with his finger. “I just think it’s funny,” he chuckled silently. “You used to say a lot of the same things in the other dimension…” He boldly met eyes with her, “and yet you took no time pinning me on a table one of the first moments that we were alone together after Marielle died.”
There were consuming flames behind her dark irises. “Grief does things to you that you cannot imagine!” She cried, gesturing wildly. “You do things that you can never imagine!” She said separating each word like she was speaking to a child… Her hand was waving wildly as if she were about to bring it down onto his face. He’d been slapped once this week, that was enough.
He stepped toward her and took her hand from the air by the wrist. “Yes, Sabine,” he whispered. “Yes…” he repeated holding her with a punishing grip so she couldn’t slap him or move. “Yes, Sabine.” She stared at him at first hatefully, then slowly it melted into something that looked like compassion, and he dropped her hand, letting it go. “We both lost so much. We both did something crazy for love, and in grief.”
She was staring into the floor before she turned back to the different things that she’d taken out. “I’m not comfortable being alone in here with you,” she finally said and she removed her coat, and started to leave.
“Why?” He called after her. “Because you know what I’m saying is true?” She paused. “Because you know that I remind you of Morgan just as much as you remind me of Marielle? You don’t think that we can be in the same room?” She slowly turned back to him; her eyes vulnerable. “You have no reason to be afraid, or concerned. Regardless of what lies beneath the surface?” She watched his eyes briefly flick down her body. “I will never touch you or try to,” he sighed, removed his glasses, cleaned them, and put them back on. “I love Marielle too much.”
“She loves Austin,” she stabbed back.
His jaw tensed, but he showed no other signs of the rage roiling within him. “And you love John, and what’s your point?”
“Why are you continuing this charade?”
“Which charade, Sabine?”
“The good guy?” She scoffed and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “You’re not a good guy, Vincent.” she growled, slowly coming back to him.
“No, I’m not,” he replied flatly. “Are you satisfied?”
“No.”
“What would make you satisfied?” He asked, taking a step toward her. “Anything?”
“I want you to admit that you lied about everything, put everyone in danger and used our feelings for Marielle to make us your puppets.”
“I did all of that, yes.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, spitefully. “Why do you care what I think of you?”
“I don’t…” he shrugged a shoulder, “care, I mean.” She looked down between them, silence passing for a moment awkwardly, “I’ll kill Cory, and this will be over, and then I’ll leave. You’ll never have to see me again.”
“Heh,” she chuckled with an eyeroll. “I have a feeling that’s not true. Your face, anyways.”
“Chamber?” she nodded. “Yes, he might be around.” He took another brave step toward her. “But I’ll be gone. Probably with Marielle.”
Sabine drummed her lip, noting the maybe five feet or less that was between them. “She was my friend, you know? One of my best friends… the other is-” Her voice trailed off. “She was my friend and she dated Morgan first, had him.” She set her jaw and her eyes filled with something dark. “He should have been only mine,” she explained. Vincent took another step, listening, intently. “And then he died and took our son with him, and she-” Sabine flung her hand out somewhere toward Marielle, “helped to kill him by locking him in there.”
“He told her to.”
“I know!” Sabine wailed, rage burning behind her green eyes. They began to burn with tears. “I – I know,” she stammered. “I was there.”
“He was only thinking of you.”
She whirled away, trying to hide her tears. “I hate you,” she whispered under her breath.“I know that, too.”
“God, I hate your damn face!” She cried.
He put his hand to her shoulder, “I know that, too,” he repeated. He gently turned her toward him. “Because you don’t, right?”
She was openly crying now. “I don’t even like you…” She collapsed against him, anchoring herself, and sobbing into his chest. He held her for a moment, and rocked her. “But y- you look like Morgan,” she whimpered. He nodded, understanding. “No, no… no, I don’t hate you.” All that he did was hold her so that she could cry. He needed her right now for their plans, so he needed her to be okay. “And again! She got you again!” She cried. He understood. Marielle had him first… Marielle had Morgan first. When he’d first come to Valorant, Sabine had tried to get him to speak for days and she’d gotten nowhere. He would hardly look at her. It was beyond frustrating. Here was a man who reminded her of Morgan, and he refused to speak with her.
“That pain is so deep… and so difficult for you that you have chosen a man who hardly looks like a man anymore to spare you a face.”
“I love him,” she insisted shakily.
He smiled understandingly. “I know that, too.”
“I don’t hate you,” she choked out. “I hate all of this. I hate that I know that I’d have done the same!”
“I know that you would have.”
She didn’t hear him anymore. She’d helped them just to be nearer to him even if it was all subconscious. It was all subconscious. She hardly liked him. “It’s not fair.”
“No,” he said with a sigh, gently brushing some of her hair back. Then he pulled back from her, afraid that if he held her any longer, temptation to do more might grip him, but he held her arms in his hands. “None of it is fair. I’m going to lose,” he explained with a nod. “So, I will get what I deserve.”
“You know that she loves Austin, don’t you?” Sabine asked, forebodingly.
Vincent blinked slowly. “Yes.”
Sabine stood back and wiped her tears quickly, trying to bury what had just happened. “What will you do, Vincent? Where will you go?”
“I’ll just disappear. You’ll never see me again,” he said quietly. “Unless she chooses me, and Austin leaves.”
Sabine nodded, considering all of this; her expression as though there were an imaginary cage around her. “Despite what you might think-” she bit her bottom lip, “-I do love her.”
He smiled wanly, “I know.” They both sat on that for a moment, processing the words.
He gestured to his computer screen. “I want to shore up the area of the spike,” he explained. “I only want to take out the Valorant compound, Cory and Finola. I want to take measures to make sure that we don’t hurt anyone else. Can you help me with that?” She nodded, again, wiping away some tears, and they went to his computer together.
***
Marielle went slowly to the window and pulled the blinds down, making the space in her office dark and still.
Presently, she had Austin’s gift in her lap as she sat on the couch.
Austin had gone and hadn’t returned. She wasn’t sure that she’d see him again today and since it was his birthday, and he had the propensity for being a little unhinged – depending on how badly things were going – she could only pray that he wasn’t going to make a horde of dumb decisions or worse, get himself killed.
She could no longer hear his thoughts, so she knew that he wasn’t nearby.
Whatever the case, she wasn’t going to try to follow him. She was meant to be speaking with Wei Ling in about an hour, and Vincent was working on the top floor with Sabine and Klara. She didn’t want to disturb him.
The moment that she couldn’t hear Austin anymore, earlier her mind had been filled with fantasies about dashing down the hall after him, forcing the elevator doors open, moving in, letting them close, and plastering him against the mirrored walls with her desperate kisses. –Happy birthday, darling… she’d whisper. –your real gift is me… and she’d stop the elevator in between floors.
She shook her thoughts free from her head as she sat in the darkness, exhausted from another night of dreams where she had been attacked by Tundra. All that she could think of after the nightmares was how very much she wanted Austin to be there so he could slip into her subconscious and fix it. Then she reminded herself that she could save herself; it had been her who had killed Tundra, after all.
How ironic… she remembered Vincent telling her that before his Marielle had died, some of her last words were not to kill Austin… he was so lost. The Marielle of Vincent’s dimension obviously didn’t know just how lost Tundra had been – or how bad it was about to get – with her no longer alive to give him any form of hope that they’d be together again. Then something in her mind clicked… she had known, hadn’t she? When he’d come to say goodbye to her, Austin had moved through her one last time. She had seen something hadn’t she?
Trying her best to let all those thoughts go, Marielle set the beautiful art piece down on the floor and turned it on, then sat back on the couch, watching it fill the room with brilliant yellows, oranges, reds, and blues as it turned and swirled, causing an unreal flame effect on the dimly lit walls of her office.
“Oh, Austin, it’s so beautiful,” she breathed, her hands clasped to her chest in awe. She felt like she was inside a swirling hurricane of fire and light and she let time slip away for a few minutes as she rested her head back against the couch and drifted, watching the way the room sparkled.
She went to her bookshelf, pulled down Chocolate and held him against her chest as she went back to the couch and stared at the swirling colors on the walls. Tears silently streamed down her cheeks. This shouldn’t be how she felt on her birthday. She should feel alive, and free, and with someone who made her feel all those things.
“I’m not willing to give this up until everything is over and I have a better understanding of what lies ahead,” she said aloud. “And…” she squeezed the bear tightly. “And I can’t be with Austin right now,” she reminded herself. “It’s probably best to just throw myself completely into Vincent and give this the best go that I can until… until something becomes clear to me.” She sighed and fell back against the couch again. “If Vincent is going to change for me – and I can already see that he has, he stops his lies now – then I want to see where he takes this. I fell in love with him, here,” she whispered through her tears. “And I knew that he was lying to me, then. And now that I have the whole picture, part of me understands why,” she continued aloud, listening to herself speak. “I’m romanticizing my relationship with Austin too much, the same way that I romanticized Vincent too much when I first met him. Austin made me feel… incredible. I’ve never felt that way about anyone.” She pulled the bear back as if she were talking to him. “And I’ve never felt that way with anyone. But I know that none of it was right,” she nodded at the bear. “None of it was right. And I’m so upset at myself for letting it happen. Vincent was right; one of reasons was because I was mad at him, but it wasn’t for revenge… I was feeling silly and stupid, like a school girl who had the biggest crush ever in those moments.” She sighed. Then she shook her head, knowing that crush was a lie, so she corrected herself. “I’m in love with Austin Rancor. I don’t know what to do about it or what is right. But I know that if he can’t work himself out to a point where he grows up, and learns how to deal with himself on his own, then we can’t be together anyways,” she sobbed, staring at the bears big ice-blue eyes. She hugged him close again, “And it’s killing me. And now we’re going to have to do Thanksgiving,” she remembered. She sighed. “I think Vincent is testing me. One final test… can I go with Austin for Thanksgiving, and still resist him. Can I come back and say that I didn’t sleep with him, that we didn’t kiss in the snow?” She flopped back and stared at the ceiling. “Can I? This test has been as much about me as it has been about Austin, hasn’t it?” She ventured, wiping away tears with one hand and keeping Chocolate under the other arm as she watched the lights dance across the ceiling and over the walls. “Yes. And I’ve failed it repeatedly. I keep giving him something to hold onto. I’m not trying to, it just keeps happening because we love each other, and we started crossing those lines the moment that I gave him that playing card…” She thought about how she hadn’t truly fought to get away from him the night that he tried to seduce her until he was practically on top of her. “Maybe even before that.” She laughed ironically. He’d said, Marielle, I won’t even- and she’d slapped him. What was he going to say she wondered… she’d never know.
She rolled onto her side, curling herself around Chocolate in the fetal position. “And Vincent…” she whispered. Then she sighed as her internal organs twisted with an obvious need to be in his arms right now.
She couldn’t stop a smile. Why did Vincent do that to her? How did he do that to her?
She knew the answer. He was secretive, controlled… subtle. She saw Austin wanting her ten miles away. Vincent had created the need within her and let it grow as he gingerly fostered it, watering it, and blowing on it, making it bloom into a desperation. When they’d made love the first time, she had thought that she would never not need him. It was true. She always felt like she needed him, and he’d done it. He’d coaxed and pulled that desire inside of her until she basically crumbled.
How good he felt against her… and yet, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking that Austin – with their strange connection – felt otherworldly.
He’d said that they were the most intimate people on the planet… he wasn’t wrong. And he wasn’t wrong about her keeping her walls up when it came to him, either. When they’d been in their affair, he said that he saw those walls. She purposefully kept them in place when it came to him. She’d been doing it since they met. What would happen if she fully let go? If she let him break them down the way that he’d wanted to that night when she’d first tasted him after her favorite room. Would they literally just become one person? The same person? And what if he hurt her? What if he betrayed her trust and sought out, continuing to take his desires out on other women and men?
She could literally be inside of him… if that wasn’t making love, she didn’t know what was, and the fact that he could read her mind and vice versa utterly terrified her when it came to actually being intimate with him. It had been intense enough with them just kissing and rolling around on the bed together. She could barely imagine what it might be like if he could literally feel her desires, and pleasure and she his… and what would happen if she melted into him while they…
There was a knock, and she bolted upright. “Hold on a second!” She called. Then she went to the window, opened it, put Chocolate back on the shelf. Then after straightening her hair a little bit, she picked up Austin’s gift, turned it off, and set it up near Chocolate, noting that the card was still there as well. Vincent hadn’t checked for it.
She sat at her desk. “Come in,” she said sweetly. Too sweetly.
When Wei Ling entered, she glanced around. “For a second, I thought that maybe Doctor Rancor was here,” she said under her breath.
Marielle looked away, trying to hide a purse of her lips. Wei Ling settled herself on the couch. “Would you like me to sit with you, Wei Ling?”
Wei Ling adjusted uncomfortably for a moment, but then nodded, so Marielle went to her side. “Happy birthday,” she said, quietly. “I got you this,” she handed her a small turquoise leather pouch from her pocket. When Marielle opened it, she discovered a trinket carved from jade. “It’s meant to keep you safe and-” her voice trailed off and she looked into her empty lap. “Give you the desires of your heart.” She rubbed her hands together for a moment nervously.
Marielle put it to her chest for a moment, squeezing it. “Thank you, Wei Ling,” she whispered. Wei Ling gave her a demure smile. “I also have this,” she said, stretching her hands out once more. They were wrapped around something that she couldn’t see yet.
Wei Ling’s hands were shaking and when she opened them, Marielle understood why. There was a small barn owl carved from wood. She remembered this and she put her hands over her mouth as her eyes watered. “He’d made it for your birthday. He told me once.”
“I sa-saw him making it,” she said with a small whimpered. She wiped her nose, forcing the tears down. “How are you doing?” She asked as she got up and put the little carved trinkets onto one of her bookshelves side by side.
Wei Ling watched them for a moment in sadness. “I’m not well, Marielle. I haven’t been well since…”
“Sasha.”
Wei Ling nodded, tears in her eyes. “I loved to call him Alexander,” she whispered, rubbing her thumbs together. She wiped a tear away. “He hated that,” she chuckled humorlessly. She put the back of her hand to her mouth as she lost all wits about her. “Oh, Marielle,” she cried. “I- I would never say this to anyone else… but I don’t want to live anymore.” She shook her head, “I have no evidence that he would have loved me, or that we would have ever had a future, which is one of the reasons that I never talked to him; I didn’t know his feelings. But now that I will never know. It’s worse, I think than it would have been if I’d just spoken to him.” She met eyes with Marielle. “I don’t want to live anymore, and I can’t imagine watching another person feel this pain.” She thrust her hands out and took Marielle’s. At first, it seemed that she was only going to hold her hands and look into her eyes, but she embraced Marielle and held her tightly, a wave of emotion spilling over into Marielle as she cried along with Wei Ling. “And now Kirra,” she whispered shakily. “My life is empty. Why do I continue to live?” she begged.
“Because you fill others lives with love and purpose. Is that something?” Marielle replied, quietly.
Wei Ling sniffed, and sat back, wiping her tears. “I suppose so.”
She missed Sasha and Kirra too, but she knew that it was nothing compared to what Wei Ling was feeling, and darkness began to settle over her then. They were going into the last confrontation in early December… who else would they lose?
***
Vincent stepped from the shower, and put a towel around his waist before he came into the bedroom. He stopped in the doorway and leaned on it for a moment taking Marielle in. She was putting a silver earring into her ear, then she fluffed her short hair after applying some dark lipstick.
She saw his reflection and turned to him in her jeans, high heeled boots, and black long sleeved V-neck shirt with no back. “What?”
“You’re just beautiful,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “In a way that I don’t at all deserve.” He went to the bed where his suit was laid out for the evening. A royal blue lined with gold.
“I feel a little underdressed,” she said, self-consciously, cocking her head at the reflection. “Should I put a dress on?”
He shook his head as he slipped into his pants and fastened the belt buckle. “You look like you.”
Her eyes moved over his upper half, his well-toned muscles, and the golden lines running over the left side of his body. She turned, glancing over her own wings, giving them a soft smile. “I do, yes.”
He came up behind her once he’d finished buttoning up his shirt, cinched his black tie lined with gold and pulled her back against him, gently rocking her. “I didn’t forget a gift,” he breathed, kissing the top of her head.
“Oh, you don’t have to give me anything,” she chuckled silently, as color filled her cheeks.
“No, Masin, I did get you something already,” he explained and he took a small box from his pocket and opened it. There was a lovely, simple silver chain inside. “I didn’t want…-” he began, still holding the box, but putting an arm around her, and drawing her against him, “-to overwhelm you right now,” he explained in a hushed tone. “I wanted to let you think, and feel however you want to think and feel. I know you’re confused; I know you’re struggling with feelings for me and how to manage them. I understand,” he whispered. He was planting gentle kisses on her temple and his presence and the way that he was holding her was consuming her. He smelled sharp. There was a hint of whiskey and somehow it reminded Marielle of the forest at nighttime; deep, dark, and worth exploring. “So, this is simple enough.” He took it from the box and clasped it around her neck. It twinkled a little as she moved. “If there is anything else that you want, my love… let me know.”
“I want your love,” she purred, turning to him and lacing her fingers behind his neck. She meant sex, his smile said that he knew that.
“You’ll get it, but you’ll wait first.” She pouted. “No, Masin. I’ll satisfy you tonight when we get home.”
She smiled at him and nodded. “Any orders?” she asked playfully.
He shook his head, “Enjoy yourself.”
He drove her to her favorite room, which, of course, he’d seen before in his own dimension, so perhaps his response to it wasn’t exactly as she’d hoped it would be, but none of that mattered.
She did her best to enjoy herself, they got drinks and sat in the open space of the foyer. He took her to dinner shortly after. There was a restaurant on the hotel grounds called the Napa Rose, and she’d never been there.
Marielle tried not to think about Austin or wonder what he was doing then. It was his birthday, too.
How was he spending it? Was he melancholy? Surely, he was. She was also sure that he desperately wanted to be with her now instead of whatever it was that he was doing. Her fingers danced over her phone, wanting to text him, or call him, or tell him not to be stupid and get himself killed tonight. She closed her phone and put it away, messages unsent.
Vincent smiled against her temple and kissed her there, as they watched Disney fireworks from a window. “Happy birthday, love.” She smiled back. She was content. She was happy.