#umbrastaff

Lucretia’s stomach is in knots, her guilt and sorrow all tangled up with Lup’s longing and joy. 

Soon, Lup. We’ll get to my office, we’ll make it safe, as soon as I can. I promise.

She can feel Lup pulling back, holding herself carefully within the confines of Lucretia’s mind. It gives Lucretia just enough space to finally focus on Taako and Angus, standing in front of her. 

Taako is standing with his arms crossed, looking at her a challenge in his eyes. Angus continues to stare at his shoes, his fingers twisting themselves into anxious knots. It's clear that since she left the Bureau, Taako has gotten Angus to tell him everything.

Lucretia can't even blame either of them. They surely want answers, and she has no idea how to go about giving them.

The umbrastaff is gone, and she has no story to give Taako about how she lost it that he will accept.

She has betrayed Angus’s trust, making him promises she never intended to keep.

And Lup—Lup is here, she found her, she freed her, and she can’t even tell Taako the good news, because he wouldn’t understand it.

Lucretia takes a deep breath.

“Taako. Angus,” she says. It takes everything she has to keep her voice even, to only let a bit of Director-ly concern bleed through. “Is everything all right?”

Taako laughs, a sound so short and bitter that it takes Lucretia entirely off guard. She has prepared herself, on some level, for Taako to be angry with her when he finds out she got Angus to give her the staff. But this is different from what she expected.

“Oh, we’re just fine, Luce,” Taako says, smiling without a hint of humor in his eyes. “Peachy keen.”

There’s something wrong about what he’s said, but she can’t place it; she’s so thrown by the open hostility in his tone, but she swears that—

Just then, distantly, an alarm bell begins to ring.

Lucretia knows instantly what it is: the alarm in her office, the alarm that protects her deepest and most precious secrets. For a moment she is confused—who could have found their way back there, and why now—?

Then she sees Angus’s wide-eyed expression, and Taako’s cold, defiant glare.

Taako says something, but Lucretia loses it entirely as a wave a realization washes over her, mixed and muddled with a burst of exaltation from Lup in the back of her mind—and she realizes what has happened.

The alarm in her office is ringing, and Taako just called her Luce.

Oh.

Oh, gods.