A life without his violet-eyed witch was the scariest thing Vad could imagine, a possibility that had become too real in the one split second she had tipped over on the tower.
He had loved his melancholy until she had touched him with her magic – with her shy looks that got bolder as she opened up to him, with the way she accepted his dark parts and filled them with her stars, with the tenderness inside her that somehow always soothed his jagged edges.
And now he couldn’t imagine going back to the melancholy again, to being an endless night without the stars, to being a lone mountain without a castle atop it.
He wasn’t a believer of anything beyond what he could see, but there had been something at work beyond his understanding that had driven him to her. Because what were the odds that the day blind Old Zelda had grabbed his arm had been the day this girl has been born. He didn’t believe in things but he was living the effect of them. It had been the same thing that had led him to look for Fury and find the violet-eyed paranoid schizophrenic with dementia at the Institute. It had been the same thing that had made him stop and glance to the left of the hallway where he’d seen her for the first time.
Vad sat in the same hallway, elbows on his knees, eyes on the door where they had taken her through.
He had been in the tunnel when that same indefinable something had urged him to get back to the castle. He had run, followed by an instinct he didn’t even understand, to the roof where two young people had already died.
Wiping a hand over his face, he glanced at the clock, trying to focus on something other than the bone-deep terror he had felt when she’d started to sway close to the edge, her beautiful eyes glazing over, lost in a place he couldn’t go, her body seizing in his arms. He had taken her to the medical room where the residing doctor had given her a safe sedative while Ajax had called for the Squad Emergency chopper, allowing Vad to bring Corvina to the Institute where she would get the help she needed. He hadn’t lied to her when he said he would move mountains to make sure she was okay. But god, he hated owing the fucking bastard.
“Mr. Deverell,” the small man he now identified as the famous Dr. Detta came towards him. Vad got to his feet immediately, his chest tight. He needed her to be okay. He really fucking needed her to be okay.
“Let’s talk in my office,” the other man indicated a door to the side, and Vad followed him in silently, taking a seat as the doctor put some brain scans on a whiteboard with a backlight before sitting down.
“I need to understand your relationship with her before I can talk to you, Mr. Deverell,” the doctor said, his tone grim.
Vad didn’t like the tone. “I’m going to marry her someday,” he said. He would have fucking put a ring on her finger weeks ago had he not known she would panic. She needed the space to grow and find her own footing within the relationship and within her mind, or she would regret it.
“That’s good,” Dr. Detta relaxed marginally. “Corvina is a very unique case, Mr. Deverell. Her upbringing alone makes her one of the most different cases I’ve seen in my forty-year career.”
“What do you mean?” Vad was glad he was finally having this conversation with the doctor, though not the circumstances around it. Reading her file was one thing. Hearing her doctor’s analysis was something he needed if they had any chance of a future.
“If you had asked me a few years ago if a paranoid schizophrenic could raise a child alone without damaging the psyche of the child, I would have said no,” the doctor began. “But Celeste Clemm not only raised Corvina all on her own, she was rational enough to make a living, home-school her, teach her everything she needed to be self-sufficient, all the while dealing with her own undiagnosed condition. It is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve heard. But then, maternal instinct has always been something understudied. It’s a very complex case.”
Vad nodded, willing the doctor to continue, willing him to get to the fucking point and tell him she was okay.
“Corvina is perfectly fine for now,” Dr. Detta said, sending air back to Vad’s lungs. The vise around his chest loosened slightly, his jaw unclenching.
“She’s fine,” he breathed out in relief.
“Yes, but she may not be in the future,” the doctor told him. “With both her parents as schizophrenics, she has a much higher chance going forward. My worry is mainly to understand how this unknown drug has affected her, if the auditory hallucinations on the roof were induced by it and if they could trigger her psychosis. There are too many variables around her for now.”
Fuck.
“We’ve put her in a medically induced coma,” Dr. Detta went on when Vad stayed quiet. “We’re flushing the drugs out of her system now. When she gets up, I’d like to monitor her for a month, just to be cautious.”
A month.
He stared the doctor in the eyes. “I’ll be staying with her.”
The older man smiled. “There’s usually no provision for that, but I believe your presence would be a positive thing for her mind. Her brain scans are completely fine and physiologically, she’s healthy.”
“Then why did she hear multiple voices at Verenmore?” Vad tilted his head, needing to understand what had been going on with her. “And the mirror incident?”
Dr. Detta looked at him from behind his glasses. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Deverell. The human mind is extremely complex. She could have simply picked up subconscious cues that manifested when triggered by something. Her friend could have been slipping her small doses of the drug without her knowledge. Or maybe she actually heard ghosts. Who knows? We don’t have any hard answers, and we probably never will. I would count your wins, and let the past rest for now.”
“But she can’t go back there now, can she?”
He shook his head. “Not right now. Her mind needs to heal from whatever traumas it has endured and get stronger first.”
Vad looked at the brain scans on the board, looking at her head without understanding it. “What about Mo?”
The doctor waved a hand. “I think her brain made it up as a child to fill in for a parent who was dead and one who was not there mentally. From her accounts, Mo will probably be with her for the rest of her life, and I don’t believe that’s harmful. And one more thing, Mr. Deverell.”
Vad turned to the doctor again, giving him his attention.
“If you are to have a healthy future with her, you need to keep your eyes out for any signs of withdrawal or unusual behavior from her,” Dr. Detta told him something he’d already told himself. “Anything odd, you bring her here so we can get her under treatment earlier.”
Vad got up and shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you.”
Dr. Detta smiled. “She’s a very special girl, Mr. Deverell. You’re a lucky man.”
Didn’t he know it.
Vad walked out of the room and went to the end of the hallway, looking out at the sunshine and the cityscape.
Verenmore had been his home for so many years, his dream, his ambition, his passion for so long. He had to make a choice between returning to the place he loved and lose the girl who breathed magic in his life or stay with her and lose the place that had driven him for so long.
He stood for a long time, contemplating, trying to imagine his future without both.
He would rather miss Verenmore than miss her.
And fuck if he wouldn’t miss Verenmore.
Taking out his phone, one he kept but didn’t use at the castle, he called his accountant to get his finances set, and then called the Board, letting them know he wouldn’t be returning, ordering them to burn down that fucking tree.
Then he walked to the room where the love of his life was sleeping, watching her fighting in her head, battles he couldn’t fight for her. Some, his soft little crow had to fight for herself while he just sat by her side, letting her know she was never going to be alone again.
