honeydew and rhubarb with caramel
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Breaking and Entering
Rating: PG (mild cursing)
Challenge: Honeydew #16: breaking and entering, Rhubarb ‘My Treat’ #5: that certainly is convenient (Victor remembers an important detail at a crucial time)
Toppings/Extras: caramel
Wordcount: 922
Summary: Robyn Walshe discovers more about Victor Blackledge than she ever knew.
Notes: NaNo excerpt strikes again! Also: Victor’s BIG spoiler.
“Damn it!” Robyn slammed her fist into the wall next to the little keypad. The twelve little keys blinked at her smugly. Wiping sweat from her forehead, she glared at the keys as though willing their combination to crawl into her head. Behind her, a great furnace roared, smelting the moonquartz and slowly becoming hotter. Before long, the entire smelting room would be too hot to sustain life.
Her partner-in-crime Victor Blackledge was stood a little to her left, gazing into the brightly blazing heart of the fire, white and furious. After a moment, he pulled the heavy-duty smelting gloves from his hand and let the thick leather pads slap to the floor.
“You saw them entering the keys?” he asked quietly. Robyn, so unused to hearing her partner’s voice, spun to face him.
“Well, yes,” she said, biting her lip. “But I can’t remember what they put in. I was trying to concentrate on not being seen, anyway. I saw it, but I wasn’t really looking... I didn’t think that they’d...” She trailed off as Victor cracked his pale knuckles idly. “I’m sorry...”
“It’s not your fault,” he replied in his quiet, patient voice. He spread his fingers open, looking at them as though they fascinated him. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze. “Robyn, I can...”
He trailed off, seeming reluctant to speak. The heat was building in intensity, and they could hear the cracks of the moonquartz hardening. Swiping more beads of sweat from her face, Robyn tried to be patient, but was finding it hard with death looming ever closer.
“What?”
“I can get it,” he said. “I can get your memory.”
“What?”
“It’s just something I can do. I can... reach into your head... and...” Victor trailed off at the look she was giving him: Robyn instantly smoothed her expression into neutral, knowing how easily affected he was by people’s reactions to his mutations. It was too late, though. His voice died in his throat.
“You can get my memories?” she asked. Victor nodded. “Why have you never done it before? We’ve known each other-what? Eight years? And you’ve never...”
“You don’t know what it was like,” Victor replied, suddenly defensive. “Remembering things is all well and good-do you know how people would have reacted if they found out I could get into their heads? I would have been locked up! I never told Father, either, because I wasn’t stupid. I knew what he’d do if he found out my... mutation was more than simply Remembering. He’d whisk me off and that would be the last anyone heard of me: a lifetime of being tested on and dissected and...”
“OK, OK! Victor...” Robyn had never heard him speak so much in such a small space of time. She stared at him, noticing the panic in his usually expressionless eyes. Another bead of sweat ran down her brow. “You can do it. Just do it. Reach into my head.”
“Are you sure?”
Robyn glanced towards the furnace and gave an exhausted laugh.
“Of course I’m sure, it’s that or death! Just... not too much prodding around, OK?”
He didn’t reply, merely stepped towards her and lifted one of his hands. Robyn swallowed as his hand moved closer to her forehead. Victor was concentrating on one spot in the centre of her forehead so hard that she could almost feel his gaze. When she glanced at his eyes, she could see the last vestiges of colour draining from his irises, grey fading to a white so pure it almost glowed. His finger touched gently on her forehead, making her shiver. It felt icy.
“Vic...”
“Don’t talk.”
The finger on her forehead suddenly increased its pressure, almost forcing Robyn’s head back. Then, suddenly, there was the strangest liquidy sensation and there was no pressure any more, just this spectral coldness moving through her forehead...
“Victor!”
“Shut up.”
“Is your hand in my head?”
No response. Victor had closed his eyes, and when Robyn gazed up cross-eyed towards her forehead she could have sworn that most of his hand had pushed its way through. Gritting her teeth, she tried to not think about the unpleasant coldness ghosting through her mind, instead concentrating on Victor’s neck, which had a blue vein very visible through the pale skin. It was a boyish, tender neck. Blackledges didn’t age like normal people did-
At that point she went blind. She was about to cry out when her vision filled with a numberpad, a lock of hair blowing in the breeze from the furnace, a finger hammering on the buttons: 8 2 4 9 2 4 5. In her ears there was a strange sensation, hearing from two different places at the same time.
And then she was back.
“Got it,” Victor was muttering, and he turned to the door and keyed in the number deftly. Robyn took a deep, shaky breath. With a lip-smacking sound, the seal around the great metallic door opened, and the door hissed open. Within moments, the two of them had hopped onto the other side and had closed it, saved from a fiery death. The furnace continued to heat up on the other side of the protective door.
“Um...”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Victor said abruptly. He moved a strand of sweat-slicked hair from his eyes with a flick of his head and began striding down the corridor wordlessly. After a moment, Robyn caught up with him, and the two of them walked on to their mission.