Kryptonite (Open to Any)

[Master Vex]

January 9th, 1881. Post-Elysium.

You don't know how much physical fear you've been carrying around until it's gone.

He'd held her, quickly, awkwardly. Felt everything he wasn't entitled to rise up like a contained quivering tidal wave. She'd been cross-eyed from focussing on him; from that distance he could see the flecks in her irises. He'd never seen her so startled.

Quick, before the falling away into nothingness, quick, quick. He'd wanted to kiss her forehead, smell her head, hold his face against hers for a moment, had in fact begun to inwardly phrase the sentence I am sorry, for everything - but stopped. The words would roll darkness down over the winking lights of her future. He thought I can't leave her which immediately sent him into sickening fall away from her because who was he? Who was he? He'd barely been there. As was correct: he'd given his financial support. He'd given his distance.

When he drew away from her the transfer of her presence from his pulled at his insides, a gentle evisceration. Turn away right now or you'll never be able to leave. Right now. Right now.

He imagined his own father standing behind him like a talisman saying, quietly: Don't look back. Don't look back. Don't look back.

So he didn't.

*

Master Vex found himself not an hour later in Hector House, the manor his Sire had left the court, found himself taking in the library's details the way you would if it was your last few seconds before being executed. The vast mathematical silence was here, in the musty tomes and ancient scrolls.

He filled a tumbler with amber liquid, remembered it was pointless, put the glass back onto the desk. The crystal winked in the moonlight.

He looked out of the window. The copse of trees was dark, in the distance, the manor surrounded most immediately by an open field. He'd pictured her last moments so many times: the frost reeling under her, her pale hair and shaking body, the split-second in which her eyes merged disbelief and fear and horror and sadness and relief - then the white and final light of fire.

This had to be better.

It had to be.