fuck you

ZENDAYA

Valentine's Day Scrapbook: Lucretia & Bebe

Zendaya

“I am probably the worst speaker of my siblings,” Dionaeia admits with a snort as she sits next to the dragon on top of the pyramid and offers her from the bottle of warm mulled wine she bought from the Holiday Market they can see on the distance, in between the buildings and the alleys. “And I have been told that when it’s not anger, I am unable to deal with my emotions, so I had to take some time to think what I was going to say before I sought you out.”

There was no joking tone in either of their voices. As much as it seemed like that was always the case with Lucretia, she took things more seriously than most. She hated disloyalty. She hated not knowing if people were on her side or not. And she hated disappointing Bebe. This was her girlfriend, the woman she had accidentally fallen in love with and that somehow loved her back. She still wasn't sure why the demon had chosen her, but she didn't want to think about them being apart again. It hurt more than she could've ever realized. Nobody ever really needed someone so she wouldn't say she needed Bebe. However, she did want her around. She didn't want the other to think that she didn't care because sometimes Lucretia felt like that was all she ever did.

Where Lucretia and Nettelia differed from they was in the weight of their grief and the height of their power. Whereas a mortal might find it in themselves to throw a rock in anger, when Nettelia lashed out she levelled mountains, and when Lucretia broke down she devastated entire cities. To some their power made them fortunate and certainly it made them strong, but the distillation of that power always came with a cost. In truth power like theirs was cruel because what so many did not see was the great, crushing weight of righteousness, lawfulness, and morality. When you could drop an ocean on someone why would you ever turn the other cheek? And when the very cause of your pain and the great catalyst for your grief was finally within reach, why wouldn't you seek to strangle the very life from it?

Godly blood stained Lucretia's hands, Oztalun's blood, but Nettelia herself had strode through it before and she would not fault the dragon for trying to overcome her father's oppressive thumb. Nettelia had coddled Octavian for too long, he was her brother, he would always be her brother, but she could not continue to excuse the things that he had done in the hope of returning him to the person he was before. That sweet boy she'd known back in Eden was gone, now Nettelia would have no choice but to shoulder the burden of cutting him down.

"You've no reason to apologise to me, but you're right Lucretia, nobody is going to feel sorry for you. They won't, I can promise you that. But their beliefs change nothing. No matter what anyone else might say, no matter what they might do, or what they might try to make you believe: you are our family and you will always have a place here." Nettelia could provide Lucretia with a safe place, but the only way to cleanse the other's soul would be to remove the defilement completely: her connection to the rest of the Asphodel, and her ability to transform into a dragon with it. Even then, Lucretia's memories would always haunt her, and her actions might still have consequences. "You will always have a place with me; when you walked away from the book you proved yourself the better of every other person in that room. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no idea the power it can hold over a person."

"No, I do need to apologize to you. I've treated you like shit and I shouldn't have." She rocked back and forth on her feet, not able to stand still as much as she tried. Lucretia didn't want to be lost and she didn't want to feel this much right now. But she was. She wondered if Octavian was the same. That would make her feel even worse if he had felt just as bad about his actions as she had. Brows furrowed, she shook her head. "I'm not better than any of them. I mean, I am because of the whole, you know, dragon thing. But I'm not better than them. I still did what I did." She shifted from foot to foot again. "I want to feel remorse. I want to say I'm better than my father in that way. I don't know if he's capable of feeling that feeling just as much as I don't know if I can. I want to feel bad for what I've done. I want to fix it, you know?" She shook her head. "I can't stay here because there's no way to fix it. There's no way for me to fix any of it without losing something." She thought of Bastien, of Bebe. She'd hurt them both to an extent, but how the hell was she supposed to fix it?

"I don't have a place anywhere because I don't deserve a place anywhere. I need to be okay with that, right? I need to...accept that I've made a mistake and..." She paused as she looked up at the Archdruid. "You had to fix things yourself. I shouldn't have asked you to help me because I should do it myself. I should suffer. All I did for fifteen years was drink myself into a stupor. Not even the gods wanted me dead. And that's so fucking embarrassing, you know. Like not even the gods wanted to kill me. I saw my girlfriend's fucking heart beating outside of her chest before that. You were gone. Everyone was gone. And they left me alone. They left Octavian alone and it's all just some cruel joke. I thought it would all be so easy, but it just isn't. I don't even know...What the fuck am I even talking about? Like I'm just saying shit and it's just...I really want a Baconator, you know?"

The Asphodel coven was no more. The Necronomicon was no more. While his magic remained, his oracle abilities still within his grasp, Bastien hadn't the slightest idea what to actually do. Pythia was still with them, likely within the depths of the shadows, and it was also likely something he should be doing. Blood was on his hands, of those that had remained dead and those that had come back when the timelines had been twisted. Who was to say that revenge was not on the table? That justice should have been served more heavily to many of the Asphodel members. Maybe that's why he was pacing around the living room, an unlit cigarette nearly destroyed between his fingers, "What are we supposed to do? Stand around with our dicks in our hands?" That was the saying, was it not?