Chapter Text
“It is bad, Vic,” she says, raising her eyes to meet his, caramel-brown to gray-blue. His features blur in the candlelight, in the fog of tears Helena has blinked back all night. “I’m in trouble.”
Her voice doesn’t waver, but the candle flickers out as it trembles in her hands. An old helplessness chases the oxygen from her lungs. She’s eight years old, splattered in blood and tomato sauce—she’s sixteen, glued to the screen of a small television, watching her cousin leave the courtroom in handcuffs—she’s twenty-three, staring down at two hundred men while Two-Face sneers up at her. She can’t stop shaking…
Calloused hands gently pry her fingers from the wax, tug her close. “Tell me,” he says softly.
She burrows into his shoulder, anchors on the texture of his skin under her cheek, the twist and tension of muscle as his arms close around her. She forces herself to match his slow, even breathing. It’s a fight not to spiral out, to be dragged under the waves of the last few hours’ relentless unreality. She can smell her shampoo on him, cutting through the cigar smoke and bad cologne that cling to her suit.
But nothing can dispel the venom of Cassamento’s words, his viper’s hiss: You’ve always been my blood and now you’re more than that. You will do as I say. They echo like a death knell in her head.
She shudders.
In the inky darkness Vic helps her with the clasps and zippers and buckles until she stands in the middle of the bedroom, shivering over a puddle of black and purple. He rummages in his duffle, retrieving a pale blue button-down that (perhaps only in her imagination, from that part of her desperate to be anywhere but in her own body) whiffs of the Canadian pines.
He eases her arms into the sleeves, smoothes it over her shoulders, frees her hair from the collar, the fabric cool and light on her skin. His hands glide to her wrists, skim the back of her hands, his fingers slip between hers. Together they fasten the buttons, the heat of his chest warming her spine. Two from the top she stops them, drags his arms across her ribcage like a life-ring, fingers still intertwined.
“Tell me,” he says again, his voice a low rumble in her ear.
For a moment all she can do is pull the cocoon of his body more tightly around her: the wall against the avalanche that will bury her.
In, out. If she’s breathing she’s alive. And if she’s alive—
She’s not supposed to be alive.
When she was eleven, Sal had walked her out of her nightmares by wrapping her small hands around a crossbow and promising her she could make herself safe. The day he was taken away, life had resumed the shifting contours of a dreamscape, each waking a tumble through the looking glass into a worse reality than the one she’d left.
Human, butterfly. She’s falling through again.
She lets the words drop from her mouth like stones breaking the surface of a lake:
“She had an affair.”