~In The Beginning~

Prodigy Child. Genius. Words that stuck with her as she had trailed the coat tails of her father in his lab. Her father her taught her everything, well near everything, she knew.

Viktoria was quite aware her father had taught her nothing of emotions. Her father knew nothing of love. A man driven by primal needs and severe focus on work.

In the end Viktoria could not blame him. Her father's work was amazing. The talk of the town. She easily would ignore the whispers she would hear as she walked in town. How it was a shame the Helios legend couldn't go to a son. So tragic that his first born and tragically his last, unless he cheated on his wife and took on a mistress, would be a girl.

The truth is Viktoria knew more then she let on and it had nothing to do with science.

She recognized the fact that she looked nothing like her mother or any of her family members. Like strangely someone had forgot to include a dash of physical representation of her mother's genes in Viktoria.

More whispers. More secrets.

They praised her brilliance but still saw Viktoria as freakishly uncommon. Willow limbs and bright eyed and coltishly awkward....how could a girl child like that be expected to take over the Helios name?

When they were not looking, when she disappeared to the rooftops of Helios Estate to get away from all the social fundraisers where her mother would smile and converse as a broken record and parrot trained imbecile, Viktoria could escape.

Be Free. By Moonlight she would write in her lab journal. Sketch. All Thesis and Hypothesis and Results.

A smile in the night. Viktoria knew she was on her way to creating her finest masterpiece.

~The Madness~

So many years spent in glorious content that others would claim odd. Viktoria was never seen without her two companions, her faithful and her created.

There were more whispers. How her creation was not as her fathers had been, that her mother was living proof of that.

Viktoria would ignore, well would attempt to ignore such comments. What did they know. It was blasphemy to even imply her mother wasn't normal that she was ....created.

Foolish notion indeed for that would imply that Viktoria herself was not just the daughter of Helios but his creation as well.

The pair watched Viktoria in the nights as she slowly fell apart. Began to break, that flawless joy severed by her own questioning of her existence.

She never took the time to explain to her creation that her words never were meant for him but spoken of herself.

Monster. Abomination

Night dark those words were silently snarled as glasses, dishes, precious artifacts were thrown and shattered against the wall till all around her there was nothing but broken glass and blood.

Shaking, fingers curled in her hair, her breath coming in ragged gasps as her heart went wild. Snapping cords in her mind of her broken sanity.

They had made all attempts to console her, she in turn would push them away. Only to order around her servant in her demands as she disappeared back in her father's lab.

Back to grave digging, thievery and alchemy. The Creation likely would believe she was working to replace him or was displeased with him. By her actions and the way she ignored him such would seem the case.

When they walked out for those nights they could convince Viktoria to leave her lab she heard the whispers of her creation that haunted her head about herself.

Monster. Abomination.

She found herself speaking those words, found her eyes on him when she spoke them.

Never to realize that all this time she'd been reaching out to him to explain what she was feeling. Her discoveries of what she was. Monster. Abomination.

Silently she had been pleading with him for some consolation. Some comfort that what she found in her father's lab journals was nothing more then her hallucinations.

That she had not found the blueprint of all that was Viktoria in her father's journals.

Yet her point never would come across, that fateful horrendous bit of miscommunication that ever seemed to dwell between a man and a woman.

She never understood why he left and broke her heart.

Certainly it had been weeks after he had left when she had finally come up from her grief of her own self discovery that she was able to open her eyes, take a look around herself, and find her world had severely changed.

All she had was madness then. He had gone. There was nothing but her faithful servant and her work.

It would consume her.

~A World Away~

"I have to go back now."

The voice is ragged, deep and rumbling and tempestuous, impossibly like the thunder which had been his first welcome into the world, a clarion call of life and magic and passion.

And doom.

Its owner, a massive figure, shadow cloaked in shadows, stands at a window, looking out on a landscape that so many could admire, but only a few could truly appreciate.

Tall, steep mountains, looking out over green valleys, stretch out in every direction. The Tower of Courtesy in Yasuo had been his home for a very long, long time, since discovering the fold in reality that had gone unnoticed by so many others. He had come out into wild lands, but he had known - thanks to the abilities his creator had, both knowingly and unknowingly, blessed him with.

The voice behind him is a startling contrast - a pleasing, peaceful tenor, singsong and soft and smooth. "Why must you go, my friend?"

His eyes, refelcting the dying light of day, hold within them a flickering light, lightning and energy held in check by the massive form it is contained within. He does not look away from the window view as he speaks. "Because I have to."

The second voice speaks softly again. "You are leaving to find her, aren't you." It is not a question.

He keeps his back to the monk behind him. They had been kind enough, when he first came. Anger still seethed within him, and pain. The monks of the Tower of Courtesy had given him shelter, food, a place to find peace. And they had helped him along the journey, teaching him to accept himself.

But he had felt that shift in the folds of reality. The feeling of the olf manor, so near.

Of her.

It called to him, a siren song that he can't block out.

"I am."

"And if you do not find what you seek with her?"

"Then I will find it elsewhere, old friend."

"What is it you seek?"

At last, the stoic figure moves, though it is only slightly, his head bowing just the smallest fraction. "The acceptance and aknowledgment of my creator. The love she once had for me, before I displeased her. Failing that...to see her happier than she was when I left."

The monk behind him bows to him. "I think the last reason is why you truly go. But I hope you find the first two as well."

"I have your leave, then?"

The tenor voice erupts with laughter, pure and mirthful and joyous. "Old friend, you have never been bound to stay here. You may go where you will."

He turns, still shadow embraced by shadows, all that is truly visible of his massive bulk the pinpoints of light in his eyes, flickering like the lighting that had breathed life into him. "I thank you, my firend, for all you and your brothers have done for me. The Tower of Courtesy is well named."

The monk bows to him and turns to leave, stopping at the door. "We thank you in return, Phaeton, for coming to us. Challenging us. And letting us succeed." And with a final bow, he is gone out of the room.

The massive man stands there for a moment, head bowed. "I'm coming home, Viktoria." A moment later, he is gone, as if he were never there.

~The Helios Estate~

The huge, dark figure stands outside the gates of Helios Manor. Flickering, electric light shows from the shadows of his hood, marking his gaze on the estate's mist-enshrouded grounds.

He knew it would be here. He had felt it move, numerous times, over the years. Each time, it was a tug on his...well, essence.

He has never considered himself to be in possession of a soul.

That was why he had left the plane of existence behind to come to this one. An escape, wishing to be rid of the constant - for him - reminder that he could not go home, for what he had done to her. For making her so unhappy, for his failure.

How he failed, he does not know, except that he had not been perfect enough. Her first experiment, flawed in some way. What experiments has she contrived since" What creation, doubtless better than he, walked at her side now"

That is not his concern, of course. His concern is to see that she has become happier in the intervening years.

If his leaving had, in fact, done any good.

As quick as his thought, he is inside the fence, walking on the misty grounds once more.

A grey shadow in the mist, lit only by a pair of sparks shown in his gaze.

He doesn't need a map, nor a guide. His sense of direction is perfect, and in any case, he is - even after all this time - as familiar with these grounds as he is with the tattooed and scarred contours of his own face.

The mist is barely stirred by his presence as he walks between hedges, through the rolling, sculpted grounds, among the trees, past the fountains of this lush, opulent estate. All familiar to him, all bringing back heart-rending memories of a time in his life when he had wanted nothing more than to stay with the lovely woman who had breathed life into his inert form.

How he had worshiped the ground she had walked on! How he had adored her! He would have done anything for her, anything at all. She had just to utter her meanest wish, and he would move the heavens and earth to give it to her.

Would it be the same now?

Who can say' He has, in the years since, gained some perspective to work with. Learned, read, traveled. Become his own person. Grown, figuratively.

But he cannot deny he still feels something for the woman who gave him life.

Cannot say he doesn't want to look, just to see. Driven by more than mere curiosity.

He walks within sight of the magnificent house and stops. He remembers the inside of that house, the exact layout. Every room, every stair, every wall, every floor. Unless she's changed it.

He remembers the room. The first place he saw when he had opened his eyes.

Fist saw her.

his world, for so long...until he had left.

"Oh, Viktoria." The words rumble out like thunder and pounding rain, mixed with a voice. "It's about time you caught up with me, even if you didn't know you were doing so."

He heard her inside, saw her at the window. That domino fall of hair, black against white, is unmistakable to him, even at this distance, even in this light.

Where he is, on the grounds, between trees, he is a shadow amongst shadows.

Save for the twin points of light that were held within his eyes, curiously flickering, much like the lightning that had brought him life.

Much like the lightning that flashed in the skies tonight.

He knows the house, knows - just by the sounds of footsteps that his hypersensitive hearing picks up - where she is going.

The lab.

His first sight of the world.

He closes his eyes.

Focuses.

Takes a step into the subtle fold of space and time.

And he is there.

The shadows of the lab are thick this night, the only light the one at her desk. He stands back from the pool of luminescence, still a shadow among shadows, watching her.

Were he human, he would have said his heart skipped a beat. Watching her from here, a position so familiar, and yet somehow strange, changed. Her head in her hands, he feels his heart ache, a strange and yet familiar sensation. How he would like to walk up behind her, to gather her small form in his arms, to show her that she is not alone!

The desire is so strong in him to do so that he finds himself walking forward before he in concious of the movement, his long, silent strides carrying his swiftly across the cavernous laboratory. He halts himself, though, just outside that pool of light cast by the lamp on her desk.

A bad case of the what ifs, as the humans would call it.

What if she still abhors him"

What if she demands that he leave, never to return"

What if she screams at him that he had ruined her life, her work, and that he should be destroyed before he can cause further harm?

Lightning strikes outside, the windows above them casting the harsh light from the bolt of electricity upon him, throwing his shadow over her. So absorbed is he in his own thoughts that he fails to notice.

The whispered question tugs at his twin hearts, threatening to break his resolve as he stands there in the shadows of the laboratory. For a moment, all he wants is to cross that expanse of space between them and pull her into his massive arms, cradle her close, tell her he had never left, not in his heart, where it truly matters.

To tell her that his thoughts had ever been with her.

To make her see that he had not wanted to leave, that he had done so only to ease her mind.

All of those thoughts are lost as she begins to turn.

Towards him.

As if she knows he is here...and it's then that he remembers the flash of lightning.

Life-bringing electricity, he can to this day feel its surge in his sinews.

And as it had brought him life once, it now betrays his presence, and as she turns, able to see his form lurking in the shadows behind her, he freezes.

For the very first time in his life, he freezes, on the verge of mind-numbing panic. His eyes meet hers, and he can see himself as she sees him - a massive shadow among shadows, cloaked in blackness, the only part of him that is truly visible the flickering points of light in his eyes.

Her name is breathed, a soft, rumbling whisper that is a faint echo of the thunder from the storm outside. "Viktoria..."

He could not leave.

Shouldn't she know that' She had created him, given him life. She had been his reason for living, and that phrase was reality in so many ways.

Oh, he could leave, really. Despite being his creator, she had no power over him - could not demand his utter obedience. He is a different being from her father's creations, or from hers - he has his own free will, has been gone long enough to have developed and matured and grown and...evolved.

But nonetheless, once she had bid him to stay, he could not leave.

The hunger in her voice, the utter disbelief in her eyes as she had seen him, heard him speak her name, her wanting him to stay, genuinely wishing him to be here, is what anchors him to this spot.

And so as her arms are thrown around him, his wrap around her, thick and muscled and either one nearly as massive as she is, though, in his mind, not nearly as lovely.

Just the feel of this embrace is enough to transport his mind back in time, years upon years, to a point when his love for her had known no bounds, no limits. He could not have denied her anything then.

Nor could he now.

That haunted whisper tears at both hearts in his chest again, in a way that the memory of her voice could not, had not throughout the decades.

"I felt you here, Viktoria. I could not have stayed away, with you so close. I had to see...had to be sure you were happy."

As his words had stung her into silence, no matter how he had meant for them not to, so her words do him now.

How many times, over the centuries, had he wondered if he had done the right thing by leaving" How many times had he convinced himself he was right to leave, that it was he that was making her life miserable, that just his presence was slowly driving her to the edge of her sanity"

That she would be happier if he simply disappeared out of her life"

Was he really so wrong" Had he missed something?

The way she holds him, her arms wrapped around him, the way she had practically ordered him not to go, though there had been no missing the plea in her voice.

He had missed something. She hadn't wanted him to go, after all, it seems...

She had not been happy to see him go. Had not been railing at him, as he thought she had been.

She hadn't hated him for his very existence.

How strange it is, after all this time, to discover that so many years, decades, centuries had been all so much wasted time!

His arms tighten just slightly around her, cradling her in his embrace as he speaks softly. "I am sorry, Victoria," he says softly. Grief for so much lost time and such a terrible error fills his rumbling, rolling voice. "I had thought that by leaving, I might make you happy again. It is of no consolation, but you should know that it was much the same for me. You were ever in my thoughts, but never an instant passed when I was happy without you."

"Dear Viktoria."

One hearing the tenderness, the adoration in that rumbling, rolling voice would not have believed it capable of coming from one such as he.

He has read her father's journals, though he never knew the man for himself. But knew of the man's absolute faith in science, in proven, hard facts. And his love of power, his lust for it, his greed and desire to control all that he could see.

For whatever deity does exist out there - if indeed there is one at all - he is thankful to it that her father had not been able to impress his own coldheartedness on her. She has the best of her father and mother in her. Her father's brains...her mother's beauty and passion.

And the worst, as well. For despite her love for him, she has her bouts of cruelty as well, her own wickedness.

He had thought once that it had been turned on him. And is glad he was mistaken for that. Whatever that cold nature could be turned upon, it was not him. Ever had he felt her warmth, her fire.

And he loved her all the more for that. Her other, darker traits he had always understood and embraced, for what lay within her also resides in him as well, being of her own making.

He is, after all, no saint, even with centuries passed in the learning of life and all its ways.

"Leaving once was nearly more than I could bear, Viktoria. I could not bear to do so again. Even if you were to ask me to, I would linger, even if it were out of sight."