(xii)
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"This is a secret, mauled and mangled, and the coins in my pocket go jingle-jangle."
-
After his revelation, Tony had smiled bitterly and left, and Abby had thought that was the last she'd see of him that day. When Tony was upset he disappeared. Preferably physically, if he could make a dignified exit. But when that wasn't possible he disappeared in other ways, locking himself up tight inside, in a box in a safe in a treasury in a castle guarded by vicious dragons and surrounded by a moat filled with sharpened stakes, leaving some kind of Tony-droid with an arsenal of masks (enough to start a classic Greek theatre) to do all the expected Tony-things, performance flawless but with something subtle but intrinsic missing. You wouldn't notice it if you didn't really know him, and she thought it was probably much the same place he went to when he was undercover.
So when Tony showed up in her lab just as she was getting ready to go home, Abby was surprised. He looked like a lost little boy; slouching, hands shoved deep in his pockets, ruining the line of the suit, eyes dark and troubled and steadily locked on the floor just in front of his shoes.
"You need a ride home?" he asked.
Abby really didn't, and he knew that, because he'd fixed her hearse himself and now it purred like a kitten. (She was more than capable of fixing it on her own, of course. When it wasn't raining, and she wasn't wearing velvet. But who was she to say no to perfectly good gentlemanly behaviour? He liked fixing it for her. She liked him in jeans and a tank top. It was a win-win situation.) But then, he wasn't really asking her if she needed a ride.
"Sure. Thanks."
-
Abby fumbled for the keys in her bag. Technically it shouldn't be hard to find them, since a rather large part of her collection of cute, funny, spooky and just plain cool keyrings was attached to them, rings outweighing the keys something like two to one, but somehow they always managed to hide themselves anyway. Her fingers finally closed on her current favourite, the one with the picture of the pouty vintage surfer boy pin-up, and the caption: 'Because I'm gay, that's why!', and she pulled them all out with an impressive clatter of metal and plastic. Then she caught Ambrosius, the huge-nosed plush zebra, by the tail, because he was the guardian of the apartment key.
Tony was still not talking.
That meant it was bad. Very bad. She'd known it was bad when she saw him in the lab, but this uncharacteristic complete silence was something else. Tony always took it hard when he failed, but this was personal, this had history, and it was obvious that whatever memories had been awakened by his encounter with Little Miss Crazy weren't good ones.
She got the door open, then let Tony walk past her into the room. He slumped down on her couch with a lack of grace that made Abby's heart clench.
"I'm making some tea," she decided.
-
The water boiled. Abby grabbed a fistful of reddish-black dried flowers, sprinkling them in the pot and pushing them under with a spoon. ...fire burn and cauldron bubble. Hibiscus tea. She saved it for especially crappy days. Tony looked like he could use it.
She poured the tea into her two Emily the Strange Strange Brew mugs, watching the heat make the print appear, then balanced the bowl of sugar and two tea spoons on top of one of them. It wobbled alarmingly as she picked it up, so she gave it an admonishing look to stay put.
Tony hadn't shifted from his position on the couch, but when she handed him a mug he roused himself enough to accept it and give her a very weak version of his usual smile.
"Karkade," he said, using the Arabic word for the drink. "I haven't had this since...in a very long time." He added less sugar than she herself did to the tart red tea and sipped it slowly. Abby watched him carefully over the rim of her cup, and wondered since what?
Silence.
"I never thought I'd see her again." Very matter of fact, very even. Too even.
Okay, so... Talk now. Abby straightened. Careful, she reminded herself. "I saw her," she ventured, making Tony look up sharply. "At the club. The night you picked me up." Abby made a face. "She made me spill my drink all over myself."
Tony's lip curled in a wry half-smile. "Sounds just like her. Get rid of the competition. Never could stand there being a prettier woman in the room."
This made Abby pause. Because sure, Tony had given her plenty of compliments before, lavish and over-the-top, but never in this off hand manner, like it was just a statement of fact, like he'd just told her the sun rises in the east. Even though it was the earth spinning around its axis and not really the sun rising, it kind of made Abby go all soft in the middle.
"Tell me about her?" she asked. "Tell me about Charlotte?"
Tony let out a long slow breath. "Tell you about Charlotte?" he repeated. "Yes. Why not. Charlotte is...Charlotte..." He ran a frustrated hand through his hair, clearly looking for the right words. "...if you use a very loose definition of the word, Charlotte is my sister. At least she's always seen it like that. She's the daughter of my Sire's mate." He laughed harshly. "Mixed blessing, she is. Born, not made, not chosen. A miracle from the Lady. And if Cora hadn't...we were all so happy!" The despair and hurt disbelief in his eyes were old, but still vivid, overlayed now by fresher pain.
Abby wanted so very badly to hug him, hard, until the hurt was gone. But it wouldn't do any good, not yet. He would pull away, hide, like any wounded animal. Perhaps Tony didn't share Gibbs' exact definition of what a sign of weakness was, but he did share the view that showing weakness was bad. She could read him very well, and this was not the time for Abby-styled comfort. That would come later. Now was the time to be quiet and listen.
"My Sire...he's a very powerful were." Tony's voice changed when he mentioned his Sire. It was slower, deeper, filled with reverence, and there were hints of an accent Abby couldn't place. "In all senses of the word. And like all powerful creatures, he has enemies. When he mated Cora, it wasn't for love. It was a purely political move, and it was very well thought out. The result was that two of the greatest threats to our pack and territory were rendered unable to move against us, at least openly. So the years just after his mating were peaceful, calm. Happy, in a quiet way. Sire was content."
He paused. "Then...Cora's scent changed. Gradually. I was no cub by then, but it's a very rare thing to happen and I had never scented a change like that before. Sire was away, reinforcing the border markings. And I was curious, so after a while I asked her about it." The self-deprecating almost-smile was back. "I wasn't very smart, back then. Hormones and a bad conscience aren't a good combination. She was livid. Forced me to bare my throat and swear not to tell anyone. 'Not even Him, pup,' she said. Next morning the maid found her almost dead in her dressing room."
His lips thinned, old anger rising to the surface. "It wasn't my Sire's child. So she'd attempted to get rid of it. Breaking one of the cardinal rules of our society to cover up the fact that she'd already broken another one. We do not kill the unborn or the young. We do not submit to any alpha but our pack leader. But she did both."
He sounded very young, then, young and bewildered, still (after however many years it was) unable to comprehend this betrayal.
"Or at least she tried," he continued. "But the child didn't die. Charlotte didn't die."
Abby viciously thought that maybe Charlotte should have died, because then there wouldn't be a whole bunch of dead people, and her skirt wouldn't be ruined, and she'd be able to listen to her fourth favourite Nick-album without seeing pictures of said dead people, and most importantly, Tony wouldn't be almost broken on her couch.
"Sire came home, and he locked her in her rooms and he posted guards outside and guards inside for the remainder of her pregnancy, but he needn't have bothered because she never left that bed again. The poison she'd taken to kill the baby had weakened her too much. She...her belly grew larger, but the rest of her just wasted away. Like Charlotte was avenging herself, taking Cora's life to be her own."
He swallowed. "We had to cut her out of Cora's dead body. The first time I saw her she was covered in blood and screaming her lungs out, but she was still the most precious thing I had ever seen. She was a miracle. All young ones are miracles to us, but she above all, first for coming into being at all, then for surviving. And I loved her, so much. She was beautiful and precocious and graceful and witty, and Sire was busy and I was charmed, so it took us a very long time to realize that maybe the poison had done damage we couldn't see. She doesn't...people aren't real, to her. They are playthings, not really alive, at least not to the extent she is. She has no empathy for anyone but herself."
Well. Abby figured that out after five minutes in the same room with her.
"It's easy to see only what you want to see, though...especially when you're looking at someone you care about. And for many years I didn't want to see any connection between Charlotte and things dying. But then..."
"Then, what?" she prodded gently. They were getting to the heart of the matter, now.
"Then..." If he'd been unnaturally still before, now he was a statue, staring into the distance at something only he could see. His voice, when he finally spoke, was flat and lifeless. "Her name was Ramona, and she was seven years old. In 1942, I was in southern Poland, and that's where I found her, just outside of Katowice. She was a Rom, of the Kalderash, and she was the last of her family. The others had been taken to the camps already, but she had escaped, hidden away by her grandmother. She was starving to death when I found her, all skin and bones and long wild hair, but her eyes were burning and at first she was too proud to take food from me. She knew what I was, the wanderers have always known the truth in the old legends, and she wasn't afraid. All that strength in such a little body."
Tony's hands were shaking minutely, and he put down the mug in an effort to hide it. "I stayed with her, protected her, and we became friends. She was fiery and straightforward and brave...like a dandelion. You would have liked her. Eventually I brought her home with me and asked Sire to give her a place in the pack. Neither wolf nor gypsy function well without a family. I was going to raise her as my own, and if she wanted to I was going to change her, when she was old enough."
His mouth twisted into a smile that wasn't a smile at all. "Didn't work out like that. Charlotte was...amused...at first, by my 'little weed', as she called Ramona, but...like I said, Charlotte has never been fond of competition, and she doesn't like to share. I came home from a trip with my Sire, and the maid said 'Miss Charlotte and Miss Ramona are having a tea party in the gardens'."
Abby could see where this was going, and she didn't like it at all.
"It was like a warped scene from Alice in Wonderland. White roses painted red. Charlotte as the Queen of Hearts, with blood in stains and spatters all over her dress, licking her fingers and smiling, smiling, smiling. 'I planted the weed in the flower bed, brother,' she said. 'I planted the weed in the flower bed,' and there was absolutely nothing in her eyes except malicious glee."
There was really nothing she could say to that, no words that could make it better. The little girl was dead, and Charlotte was a psycho killer, and he had loved them both, probably loved them still. So she did the only thing she could. She hugged him, as hard as she could, and he hugged her back as if he wasn't ever going to let go.
To be continued.
Author's Chapter Notes:
there is talking. LOTS and LOTS of talking. which i am not terribly happy about. but it had to be done.
Chapter End Notes:
you know the drill. i still don't own anything. nada.