I'm really not sure where I'm going with this so bear with me. I'm having trouble letting go of Tesla in '43 and figured a little bit of sequel wouldn't hurt. But first, a little of my twisted humor. ~Gunney
Chapter 1
Somewhere in Belgium, Maybe
March 1943
Nikola woke. The air around him was frigid. His ears were assaulted by loud clanging and screeches, the sounds more prevalent in his left ear than his right. The ground smelled like straw and feces and molding wood. Only it wasn't ground, it was a floor. He could see the ground through the floor, from where he lay on his side, and he watched through barely open eyes as it slid by at an alarming rate.
Truck maybe, or a train. The rhythmic clanging and the screeching and the constant jolting told him it was most definitely a train. The motion was making his stomach clench. Since he rarely ate he had no reason to feel sick to his stomach. It had to be something else and he decided that sitting up might relieve it. He brought his right hand up to use it for leverage and was surprised at the scrape of metal and the involuntary movement of his left hand.
Chains, attached to heavy metal cuffs. The cuffs weren't attached to anything but him. He jolted up right and shifted his legs. More chains.
Memories came flooding back. Liege, Belgium. The fountain, the entertainment troupe that was to disguise his presence in the city as a spy…Bijou. Then their escape. Nikola's final showdown with Kohrber. He had tried to kill the German Colonel. He could only assume that he had been stopped.
The myriad of holes in his coat and suit jacket confirmed it, along with the still drying blood. And he was hungry.
He stumbled to his feet and stood in the swaying boxcar, noting quickly that he was alone inside, but probably wouldn't be outside. If they saw him as enough of a threat to chain him surely they would have seen fit to post guards.
He broke the chains quickly and easily. The cuffs could come off later. He had been underestimated, but that sort of mistake never happened twice. If he was going to make good on his escape he would have to do it right.
He picked up the sway of the car and moved with it to one of the long walls of thin boards, peering through the gaps at snow and barren trees and distant houses. It might have been late afternoon. Same day, he assumed, as it shouldn't have taken him longer than a few hours to recover.
He had never been terribly good at the outdoors thing, but if his time in the wilderness as a very young man had taught him anything it was how to read cardinal directions using the sun.
They were headed south east, more than likely Kohrber thought he was taking a prize back to the precious Fuhrer. Nikola smirked to himself a little disappointed that he wouldn't be there to see the little man tearing Colonel Franz Kohrber into bite sized pieces. But he wasn't that fond of trains, and he had stopped liking Belgium the second time he was shot in the country.
No, it was time to depart, he decided and there was a bridge ahead. The vampire backed away from the wall he'd been peering through toward the opposite wall, hoping that the bridge was over water and not a rocky, dry canyon. Of course being wet in the frigid air wasn't all that enjoyable either—
He cut off the thought trail, vamped and charged the wall. Wood splintered and flew as he crashed through the flimsy barricade. He just barely caught a glimpse of the river below before he flipped around in the air. He could see the shocked faces of two Arian teenagers on the roof expected to keep him at bay, then he flipped again, curled into a ball and crashed into the coldest water he'd ever before experienced.
Paris, France
Present Day
"Oh, yeah right!" Will said, slamming a half full glass of orange juice down on the table.
Nikola blinked at the interruption, his lips working to keep the delighted smile to a minimum. Both Helen and Elise Bronstien-Dumont, who had been listening intently to the story, stared at Will as well.
"Please! Like the Nazi government would make the mistake of only putting you in chains, regular old iron chains. I mean you're a VAMP-" More than just the people at their table were now staring over at the irate blonde and Will quickly dropped the volume of his voice, looking around sheepishly. "You're a vampire. Of all the research and preparation they did, how could they not know what you were capable of."
"I didn't even know what I was capable of.." Tesla said, sharing a glance with Helen. "The benefits were long life and perfect health, but other than a few months tracking down Adam Worth, I rarely left the lab. Towards the end of the 1930s the world knew me as a pathetic, crazy old man—"
Will muttered something that Tesla knew he would never repeat, but he paused anyway to give the whelp a proper glare before continuing. "I was holed up in a hotel room most of the time." By then Tesla was pouting a little. When his bright gray blue eyes shifted to her, Elise burst into a fit of giggles, and hid behind her mimosa.
"It is true, Will. The Axis' use of abnormals was a desperate grasp at something they knew nothing about. In fact they worked very hard to exterminate as many abnormals as they could before they thought about using them to their advantage."
"So then what happened?" Elise asked, her English attractively accented, her voice slightly gravelly in nature. It was clear to Helen and Tesla that she was enjoying every moment of this trip down memory lane, regardless of how much of it Will believed.
"I froze." Tesla said.
Somewhere in Germany
March 1943
The river was cold and deep enough that he remained fully submerged for more than a minute before he recovered enough from the impact to swim to the surface. His lungs started to burn, even as the cold was shocking him numb. He was already being carried downstream and he could hear shouts above him. He spared a glance just as one of the soldiers opened fire on him.
The train was still moving and the soldier's aim was off. It hadn't stopped yet, Kohrber didn't know he had escaped, but it wouldn't take long.
Though it was March the weather had taken another step back towards winter. The mountain fed river was frigid and movement was challenging enough without the pesky need for oxygen, or the pain that was starting in his feet and his fingertips.
He wanted to swim to shore but he would be sluggish, waterlogged and hypothermic on the bank while struggling through what looked like several feet of snow drifts. No, it was best to let the river carry him away, he thought, just before he drifted to sleep.
He'd had this wild hope that when he woke it would be in the arms of a lover. There Helen would be, with his head propped in her lap, brushing a warm cloth across his brow and whispering sweet urgings to him, demanding that he live, professing her love. Promising everything he'd ever desired if only he would live.
And when he woke there was something warm and wet against his forehead. It smelled revolting but it was warm and Nikola knew a brief moment of regret when the warmth stopped and was replaced by a brief shower of snow and dead grass.
He batted open the eye closest to the ground, having to fight the pull of ice crystals that had formed on his lashes. He caught the hind end of a mutt wagging away from him, saw the splashes of yellow that had landed near his hands instead of on his face and gagged reflexively.
He lifted his head from the ground, moaned at the throbbing that began immediately, but kept going. Every move he made meant a snap of ice crystals that had formed in his soaked clothing, the working of fingers, hands, toes, appendages that had literally died as a result of severe hypothermia.
Getting to his feet was a practice in the law of leverage. He could barely bend his knees or his elbows so he was forced to teeter one way and then the other until he was upright. His left hand had frozen in an upright position giving him a semi-permanent awkward wave.
Thanks to the dog he dared not open his right eye, that being the only concession he could make to the rampant germ phobia that he was otherwise forced to ignore. One of his legs was twisted inward and frozen in that position. Forward motion would be impossible at best, but given that he was Nikola Tesla, boy genius, vampire and he added Belgian spy to the list; he could easily do the impossible.
Paris, France
Present Day
Will's laughter stopped him again. Nikola had left out the part about being peed on because he knew it would mean an interruption from the psychologist, but there was nothing else that he had said that should have led to hilarity.
All three of them leaned back in their chairs and stared as Will drew in desperate breaths, tried to say something, then was overwhelmed again and fell out of his chair. His foot flew out when he tried to catch himself, upset the table and dumped a glass of wine in Tesla's lap. The vampire jumped back, his supernatural speed allowing him to avoid the majority of the spill though some of it did land on his shoe.
Elise was caught up in it, trying to gauge where her reaction should be compared to the now angry vampire, the amused but disapproving brunette, and the still breathlessly entertained blonde on the ground. The open air café they had chosen to have breakfast in that morning was relatively full of customers, most of them young college students and tourist couples.
Will's first outburst had drawn their attention. This latest one had made him the center of it. He began to regain control of himself, working his way to his feet, still out of breath but no longer rolling on the ground. Magnus looked alarmed, her eyes going between Tesla and Will, not sure what the vampire was going to do. He still stood frozen in place staring at her second in command.
Will swallowed hard and took a deep breath, his eyes watery. He noticed that Tesla was still standing, glowering, and was altogether unfriendly.
"I'm sorry…" He said, choking a second later on the words and another burst of laughter that he kept behind closed lips this time.
A moment later Tesla broke out of his freeze with a huff and marched away from the table, glaring angrily down at the wine on his shoe, mumbling to himself.
Helen turned her most stern look toward her protégé.
Will gave her an innocent, 'what did I do?' shake of the head.
Helen sighed and looked in the direction Nikola had disappeared.
Elise asked, "Is….is this a joke I don't know?" Wondering if she hadn't missed something in her translation of the English. Helen shook her head, pointing at Will, just as clueless.
"Oh come on!" Will said. "Half dead, half alive."
Both women stared at him.
"Zombie!"