Five Weeks (open)

"That's his choice..."

"I don't get any of this, you know that. Yet I keep getting caught up in your family, from Victoria trying to use me, to your father actually managing to get me to pay him to take the blood he needed to sustain himself, and now this. Anyway, I actually want to just come over there and hug you and tell you to let it all out and say everything, but I'm not sure how you'd take that."

She turned to look at him.

"What do you expect me to say? That I am hurt, angry, that I have spent over a month not leaving my house because everyone I care about nearly died in trying to kill that bitch? What do you want from me? To be glad about all of this? I tore my closest friend's arm off of his body trying to run out the door at noon because of this and he tried to keep me inside, so that I wouldn't run out in the sun."

Victor nodded. "That is about what I expect you to say. Yes. Along with the attendant emotions that go with it. And I expect to listen while you unload. Because you are rightfully so, a terrible wreck, but even a wreck gets visited by a tug to try and bring it back to shore. So, I'm going to sit here, and sip this rum just like I did with Angelo, and just like with him, I expect you to run through the whole range from anger, to grief, to denial, to probably anger a few more times, until we have something of a breakthrough moment. And it will be because you are worth the trouble."

She laughed wryly.

"There's a problem with your plan, Victor."

"Of course there is. No plan survives implementation intact."

She sighed.

"I'm not even sad anymore. I am crying because I am not sad. I don't feel anything. Like a zombie walking around and going through the motions."

"Then you apparently still have the ability to grieve over your currently missing feelings, which means they are there, but are nicely suppressed."

"You ever watch MASH? The TV show I mean."

"Yes," she said tiredly.

"Well then Hawkeye, you remember that last episode. Only you aren't substituting a chicken for a dead baby, which is a plus."

Victor took another sip from his flask and smiled. "Do you want to be an empty blank shell, or do you want to feel again? "

She tilted her head and gave him a look.

"I don't think you understand my current apathy....."

"No, I really don't. But I imagine at some point you'll be explaining it, which will be a tremendous amount of progress. "

She stared.

"Progress?" She seemed a little incredulous. "Victor, I was bound to Victoria."

Victor raised an eyebrow and nodded. "That was an important bit of information that was previously lacking."

"Hoo boy."

"Yeeeeah," she said and shook her head.

"Tremere and their blood bonds. Now the question is if you can literally ever recover, or learn a work around. So just how well does this time travel crap the True Brujah do work anyway?"

Her eyes narrowed.

"You're not seriously thinking of bringing her back, are you?"

"I'm seriously thinking that if a video recording of me or you holding tonight's newspaper or something and saying don't do it' showed up before I contacted Victoria on Joseph's behalf, I can assure you I would sit around not doing whatever I was planning on doing for a period of time. Or even be more descriptive in the note. I dunno. I'm just saying, I know me. Warn me five, six weeks back, I probably won't leave the house, let alone call Victoria."

She ran a hand over her face.

"Do you forget that I am married to a time Mage? It's not just this timeline she was killed in."

"No, I literally did not know that. All I know about time travel comes from vague whispers of what the True Brujah can do, and several weeks binge watching Doctor Who after the surgery you did on me. But now on the topic, ignoring her death, can we at least keep her from embracing Joseph? At which point, you, me, Joseph and Jamie can sit down and have a nice long, don't kill literally the only Ventrue who sticks up for your father in the clan and see about embracing him the nice way?"

She shook her head.

"No. It's done. That's the problem with time travel - you literally cannot change huge life events like an Embrace. You change it, he dies."

"I see... what about having you there at the embrace to temper the effects of what she did? Yeah, I know you still want to kill her and the resulting broken bond problem. Although I thought there were ways to break a bond with Tremere magic?"

"There are," she said, rubbing her hands over her face. "It involves being skinned alive and still feeling the shattering of the bond on top of it. I went through it once. I don't particularly want to go through that again. It's humiliating, degrading and painful beyond belief."

"One. Is it possible to go back in time to let you do that first? And Two, is it preferable to what you are experiencing now? Also three, can you be drugged for it?"

She shook her head.

"Yes, fuck no and sadly, no."

"Ok... Well I had to ask. So much for the Marty McFly options. Unless there is something I'm missing."