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Showers are a perfunctory thing for Lucretia. They have been since cycle 6. She remembers enjoying them once—the feeling of water flowing all over, steam rising and cocooning her with heat stolen from IPRE water heaters. She’d get up early in the morning, before anyone else, to chase that heat, and she’d take long showers, and she’d take the time to relax and to wash her hair. She kept it down to her chest at that time, albeit in a bun most days—letting her hair loose had always felt a bit vulnerable to her—and while it didn’t take hours to clean or anything, it did take some time. And, she thinks, it was time she didn’t mind taking. Because she liked showers.
That’s not really the point, though, whether or not she liked them. She cut down on a lot of things she liked when the cycles started, and showers were hardly the biggest loss among them. Davenport tried to keep it quiet, but some of the planes they landed on weren’t exactly resource-rich, and since the Starblaster’s resources didn’t renew across cycles, he did a lot of little things to keep their stockpiles up to acceptable levels in case of a bad year. After all, they could ask Taako to transmute a deck of cards into a bar of soap, for example, but they couldn’t spend an entire year asking Taako to burn all of his daily spell slots on transmuting the gelatinous sludge filling a large portion of the plane on cycle 6 into water for the entire crew to take long, luxurious showers. So everybody gives some things up. On this particular cycle, Merle, with a small, pained smile, says he’s going to focus on cultivating plants that don’t require a lot of nutrients or water. Barry has never really been one to luxuriate anyway—his wardrobe, for example, could politely be described as ‘utilitarian’, not that Taako or Lup were ever too concerned with politeness when it came to fashion—but he does quietly begin research on an improved filtration system. Taako insists a bit rudely that Lup’s hair gets gross when it’s not washed regularly, long as it is, so he does transmute water for her, and she uses evocation magic to heat it, and she washes her hair. It’s probably the most spell-heavy morning routine on the ship.
(Lucretia asks Lup about it at some point that year. Lup exhales, running her hand through her hair with a distant smile, and says, “I told him I didn’t mind. I look fabulous even with crusty hair, thank you. But it’s always been—important to him.”
It’s not until a later cycle that Lup talks about their childhood in the caravans, and how the people that ran them demanded them to be presentable at all times without giving them the things they needed to make that happen, how they’d withhold the food they made if they looked ‘unsanitary’. She does learn, however, that same year in cycle 6, that the spell it takes to transmute the sludge into water is at a higher-level spell slot and can only work in small quantities, and she also learns that the spell to make your hair look presentable even when it’s not been washed regularly is much lower level. Taako doesn’t let anybody touch his hair that year, not even Lup, but he does stroke his fingers through hers, and his eyes flutter shut, and he exhales and looks at peace.)
Lucretia, on her part, cuts her hair to the nape of her neck. It means the showers she does take require less time, and anyway, the plane they’re on is very muggy and the occasional breeze on her neck feels nice. She tells herself this, but she feels more exposed than ever before without her hair curtaining her face as she writes in her journals. But if it’s for the good of her crew, her—friends?—then she’ll do it.
Merle gives her a thumbs up and a wide grin. Davenport tells her she looks lovely. Barry trips over his words a bit when he tells her that short hair looks good on her. (He stutters a lot though, those early cycles. She doesn’t have any reason to believe it means anything in particular.) Magnus pulls her into an effusive, warm hug and welcomes her ‘to the short hair club’, then pulls the best poker face she thinks he’s ever managed and tells her that sideburns are the next step in her transformation. He sees her horrified face and laughs, then ruffles her hair affectionately and tells her she’s rocking it. Taako looks over it critically, then tells her he can even out the jagged edges on the bottom, and that when he’s through she’ll be Fantasy Vogue-ready, and then he asks her with a contemplative expression if she’s familiar with hair wax.
(She isn’t, but Taako takes it upon himself to change that.)
Lup takes one look at her and wolf whistles, loud and appreciative. “Hot damn, Luce, you fine piece of ass.”
“My ass is no more fine today than it was yesterday,” Lucretia says, pretending confidence even as her heart pounds in her ears.
Lup wiggles her eyebrows, faux-lascivious, and purrs, “Exactly,” and Lucretia chokes on her dumb confidence and also air.
She knows they’re playing it up a bit too much for her sake, knows she’s probably projecting her discomfort with the change like a beacon, but it’s part of the reason she loves them. Will love them. Has loved them, and will always. Tenses get a bit messy when she’s remembering her time with the people who would become her family, really, but the love is a constant.
The next cycle, almost as if to laugh in the face of what they had gone through the previous one, was a plane made almost entirely of freshwater lakes. Everybody lived on boats, and showers were the furthest problem from their mind. But Lucretia keeps her hair short, because habits are hard to break, and she doesn’t know what’s up ahead.
And then she never stops, because even when they’re on what will become the last cycle, she still doesn’t know how to get rid of the feeling of panic that she gets when she thinks about growing her hair out again. She doesn’t even know why she gets that way, really. Water isn’t in short supply on this world, and there’s plenty of cool breezes to go around, and it’s not like there’s anything stopping her.
Maybe, she thinks, it has something to do with not wanting to change again. If she keeps her hair short, no matter how many atrocities she’s committed against her friends, there’s still a part of her that will be the Lucretia that they cared for. She laughs bitterly in her room the first time she thinks this; not because anybody can hear her, not because anybody is in this room, but because the idea of any part of her being worthy of her family’s love is just so patently ridiculous now, with all that she’s done. She doesn’t deserve to hope that there will be any forgiveness waiting for her at the end of this. She doesn’t deserve anything at all.
She keeps her hair short, though, and when she enters Wonderland and they have her sacrifice the color of her hair on the first spin of the wheel, and when she exits, light-headed and hurting and guilty and sad, she touches her newly-white hair and thinks dazedly that she was wrong. This, clearly this is what she deserves, is to be completely unrecognizable as the Lucretia she was on board the Starblaster. Not that any of her family could recognize her now even without the age and the hair color change. She made very sure of that. Something hysterical wells up in her at the idea that there is nobody left who knows her, and she pitches to the ground of the Felicity Wilds, curled up as tight as possible, and she hyperventilates into her knees even as tears flow freely down her face.
She starts putting together a team of people to do what she could not, and all of them fall, and she wonders what it says about her that her first thought is getting her family back to help her with the plan they had been against from the beginning, except this time as the Madam Director. She has to suppress that hysterical laughter again when a Seeker reports that they’ve found a band of travelers matching the description she put out. Apparently, even without their memories, they’re drawn to each other, and it’s almost physically painful that they don’t feel that same draw to her. She doesn’t blame them, though. She can’t even recognize herself at this point. She doesn’t think she wants to.
It’s only after everything, after they all remember, after Taako points the Umbra Staff at her and looks so fucking broken, after Lup is back, after Taako proposes putting the shield around the Hunger, after she realizes how very blind she’s been, after the Hunger is defeated, after it all, that she realizes she doesn’t even have any more tears left. She never knew it was possible to be so empty and keep—moving, keep living. What’s inside her now isn’t even the roaring guilt, or the need to protect her family at the cost of everything else, or the despair or the hopelessness or any of it. It’s just so much nothing, and she sits cross-legged on the floor of her quarters in the base and stares at a nondescript point on the carpet.
She’s been staring, barely blinking, for probably an hour when she senses something next to her. She doesn’t move to look at whatever the something is. Maybe someone is here to ask her to pay for her sins. That would be fair. She certainly wouldn’t stop them.
“Luce,” the something says, and Lucretia may have changed past what she ever could have predicted, but she’ll never be able to change the part of her that recognizes Lup’s voice. She doesn’t say anything back. Is Lup going to be the one to ask her to pay? That would also be fair.
Lup pauses. When she speaks again, it’s with a smile in her voice and an undercurrent of almost unfathomable gentleness, despite the contents of the words themselves. “I can’t really whistle without lips, but damn, Luce, if I could I would. That silver fox look is hot.”
Lucretia laughs, incredibly startled, and there’s something about that complete irreverence that brings everything back, and ah, there are the tears that she thought were gone. She sniffles, then presses her hands to her face and wails, and the sobs come loud and harsh as everything crashes in on her all at once. She’d been so convinced of her own power, of her own fucking strength, that she hadn’t even bothered thinking about whether there might have been a solution that didn’t involve her fucking over her entire family in one fell swoop. Gods, it seems so obvious in retrospect, and now she’s ruined everything, there’s no way they’ll ever forgive her, especially Taako. And she’s lost everything so many times, but this time it’s finally going to stick. There’s no redos on this, she can’t just take back taking away their memories and lying to them and—and— She desperately tries to form an apology, just a simple ‘I’m sorry’, anything, but she can’t even make words for how hard she’s crying.
There’s a flash of red in her peripheral vision, and Lup says, far too kind, “Aw, Luce. I can’t exactly rub your back right now, so either you’re going to have to showcase how bendy you can be by rubbing your own back or we’re going to have to talk about this.”
“I’m so fucking sorry,” she finally chokes out, “I’m so—it’s all—I’m sorry,” and Lup sighs and edges a bit closer. A skeletal hand rests above her knee, not touching, but Lucretia can appreciate the gesture.
“Of course you are, sweetheart. I know that.”
“They—we could have found you, we could have saved you, and—and the memories and—” The despair is a chasm that yawns in front of her, and she doesn’t see herself having the strength to lift herself out.
“There are a lot of things that could have happened, Luce. Hell, we spent a century going through alternate realities; we know better than anyone that a lot of things can happen.” She pauses again. “But on this plane, they only went one way, and that’s not something you can change.”
Lucretia thinks maybe that should have made her cry harder. Instead she just chokes on a hiccup and stares directly at Lup for the first time tonight, eyes wide and frantic.
“You didn’t find me until today, and you didn’t save me, and you took their memories. All of that is what actually happened.” Lup exhales softly and leans back on her hands. “And there are an infinite amount of better choices you could have made. But also an infinite amount of worse choices, don’t you think? Like, we got the Hunger, in the end. It’s gone. And who are you to know this isn’t the only way it could have happened? If it hadn’t taken so long for the Relics to be collected, maybe the Hunger wouldn’t have been weak enough. Maybe if they’d had their memories they couldn’t have come up with the shield idea. I don’t know. I don’t know, Luce, but there’s also no use in thinking about it, because all of the thinking in the world won’t change what is.”
Lucretia looks away again. “That’s very pragmatic of you,” she says, voice dull even to her own ears as the post-cry numbness begins to set in.
“I had a lot of time to think in that umbrella, after all,” Lup says loftily. “I can probably write a self-help book full of just like, fucking umbrella thinking.”
Lucretia huffs. She’s back to looking at the stain on the carpet. She doesn’t know if she can bring herself to think like that, to absolve herself of this guilt.
Almost as if she read her mind—sort of like she’s always been able to, really—Lup continues, “Don’t get me wrong, you can feel bad about what you did. You can hate yourself and ask for forgiveness and hate yourself even more when you don’t get it. You can do whatever it takes to get yourself out on the other end. But, Luce, there is an end, you come out on the other side, and I need to know you know that. We can’t all have fought together and lived together and loved each other and given up everything for one hundred fucking years just for this to be where it ends.” Her voice has grown fierce. “This is the cycle where we finally fucking win, all of us together, and even if today isn’t that day for you, we’ll get you there. Okay?”
Lucretia is silent. Finally, she says, “I’ll buy your book when it comes out. ‘Fucking Umbrella Thinking’, was it?” It’s a poor attempt at a joke, but Lup chuckles happily anyway.
“Only so long as you also buy its X-rated sequel, ‘Umbrella Fucking Thinking.’”
Lucretia doesn’t blush like she would have back on the Starblaster, back when things were different. “Wait, is that referring to you thinking about sex while in the umbrella or about the ways umbrellas think about—”
“Lucretia, you ruined my kick-ass sex joke,” Lup whines, sagging her incorporeal body against Lucretia’s shoulder even as she shakes with barely-restrained laughter. “Stop thinking so much.” And when Lucretia looks over at her again, Lup is staring at her with what probably would have been a pointed expression if she were capable of it. “Stop thinking so much,” she repeats unnecessarily, but softer. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Lucretia echoes, and a ghost of a smile flickers across her face before it’s gone again.
Things don’t return to normal, after that, not that they ever had much in the way of normal in the first place. Lup visits, sometimes with Barry, sometimes alone. Magnus starts showing up too, and when she questions why he’s not angry, he tells her frankly that he is, but she’s still his sister. Merle just comes once, just to tell her that he loves her, and Lucretia rolls her eyes now at the now-past thought that she could ever run out of tears.
Davenport doesn’t drop by. He takes to the sea, but he does speak to her on her Stone of Far Speech before he leaves, and he says quietly that he needs some time before he can get past what happened, but that nothing can change the bond that they all have. She nods before realizing he can’t see her, and instead whispers, “I understand.”
“So do I, you know. Understand. Sometimes you get so caught up in the mission that you can’t see anything else.” A sigh. “I just wish I could’ve seen what you were putting yourself through.”
“It’s not—” Your fault, she’s going to say.
“Yeah, I know.” The sound of shifting fabric, then, “I’ll see you, then.”
(It will be some time before he keeps that promise, but it’s well worth the wait.)
Taako is probably the hardest. He was hard to get through to when they were on neutral ground, and the ground between them is far from neutral now. He’s furious, and hurt, and when he’s angry and feeling betrayed he either stays away or lashes out.
He tries the first option for the first few months. Lup comes in one day, a few weeks after her body is back, full of restless energy, and Lucretia waits patiently for her to tell her what’s going on before Lup admits that she and Taako had fought before this particular visit. About her. Taako wants Lup to be mad, too, and he doesn’t understand why she’s not, and he doesn’t know why she’s not taking his side—
Lup kneads her clenched fists into her face at that, and Lucretia flounders. “There’s no sides here,” Lup says, almost defensive. “There’s not—we’re family, we don’t let stuff like this stop us.”
“I mean.” Lucretia sighs and lays back on her bed. “It’s not like I blame him.”
Her eyes are resolutely closed, but she knows when Lup is glaring at her. “I’m not going to—Gods, I know healing takes time, but I refuse to let you both spend the rest of your life with Taako as judge and jury and you just letting yourself be condemned because you feel bad. That’s not—” Lup makes a frustrated noise. “I won’t let that happen.”
And Lup has never been one to not follow through. A week later, Lup ushers Lucretia unceremoniously into a medium-sized room, where Taako is pacing like a caged tiger, complete with a snarl when he sees her. Lup says, “This room has Zone of Truth cast on it, and you guys are going to talk to each other.”
“Like shit,” Taako says on a growl.
“I’m not letting you guys out until you do,” Lup says stubbornly, and locks the door.
Taako visibly grits his teeth, then looks at the room like he’s considering what it might take to get out by force. They both know he could blast the room all to hell with ease, but getting past Lup would be a different thing.
Finally, some of the fight leaves his body, and he whips his gaze to Lucretia, eyes narrowed. “Okay. This is how this will work. I’m going to yell at you, and you are not going to try to explain yourself, and you are not going to apologize. You’re going to let me, and then—we’ll—go from there, I guess.”
Lucretia nods, gazing back at him steadily.
He begins pacing, again. “Fuck,” he swears. “Okay, you—first, you took her from me.” His breathing gets a bit irregular for a moment, caught somewhere in between a scream and tears, but he doesn’t do either for now. “Lup. You made me think I—I was alone, that I grew up without anyone. You kept me from looking for her. You—” Breathless laughter with an edge of hysteria. She knows the feeling. “Fuck you so much, honestly, for that. You made me forget her.”
He looks at her again, almost daring her to deny it.
“Yeah,” she whispers, clearing her throat. “I did.”
He’s almost taken aback by the admission, but he carefully schools his face. “Of course you fucking did, that’s not—it wasn’t a question, homes. And then you lied to me, to all of us, you made up some villain so we wouldn’t question you, and then you had the nerve to ask us if we trusted you—” His voice cracks a bit. “Asking us what you had done to lose our trust, fuck, like—and all along Barry was just—Gods, Lucretia, you just lied and lied and you manipulated all of us and the worst part, or maybe just one really fucking bad part in the middle of a cosmic dogpile of bad fucking parts, I did trust you!” His voice had been rising in volume throughout, so he shouts the last part, and the admission hangs in the air between them heavily. He turns away, and as loud as he was just then, the next part is barely audible. “I spent one hundred years convincing myself that I could trust all of you, so much that I actually believed it, and that’s—I couldn’t, in the end. And, you know what, you didn’t bother trusting us either.”
Taako’s personality has always been so big, the sort that fills up a room whenever he walks in. He looks very small right now.
“The Relic Wars destroyed all of us, you know? But we could have talked about—we could have figured something out. The Hunger shield thing, we were all smart enough to figure that out if we just fucking talked about it.” Everything about him right now spells defeat. “I was smart enough to figure it out, probably, if I wasn’t so…done with it all. If I could have brought myself to care.” He swipes his hand across his face in a poorly-disguised attempt to get rid of what she presumes are actual tears this time. “But I only cared about you all. Just you. And you made me forget all that.” His fingers are tapping an uncomfortable, irregular rhythm on his thighs. “You made me forget you, even, Lucy.” More laughter, but it’s just bitter this time. “Two entire fuckin’ sisters, gone in an instant.”
Lucretia swallows. Her throat feels too big, a bit closed off. She’ll probably end up crying again. “You were probably better off without me.”
He scowls, still resolutely not looking at her. “Fuck you,” he says, without heat. “All of us were always at our best when we were together.”
There’s a long silence while both of them fight to regain control of their emotions. Eventually, Taako says, “And another thing.”
Lucretia waits.
“That one Candlenights before the whole thing with Lucas. I made you a macaron. You wrote down notes about how to make it.”
Lucretia blinks. This seems…a bit off topic, but she’s not going to stop him.
He finally lifts his gaze to glare at her again. “And now I know for a fact that I had taught you how to make macarons before, you ass, which means you either were totally faking or, even worse, you forgot my lessons.”
She doesn’t intend to laugh, surprised and low and bright, but the twins have always managed to draw that out of her. “That’s what you’re hung up on in the end?”
“Hell yeah I’m hung up on it! What was the point in teaching you how to make them if you’re just going to forget? What, you can remember the color of Lup’s thigh-highs in cycle 36—” Lucretia sputters gracelessly— “But not my flawless macaron lessons? Hey, buddy, I might be wearing out the phrase by now, but fuck you!”
Her cheeks are colored pink as she murmurs, “I mean, I don’t necessarily remember—”
“Honey, you clearly wrote it down in the journals, because now everybody in this planar system knows the color of Lup’s thigh highs in cycle 36.” Taako snorts, slumping against the wall and raising an eyebrow at her. “Pink, by the way, it’s not exactly a revelation.”
“They were very nice socks,” Lucretia offers delicately, and Taako stares at her another few seconds before laughing again, but this time genuinely. She joins in, until they’re both helplessly giggling a few feet away from each other.
“Is it terrible that part of me wishes there was actually Zone of Truth on this room so that I could hear what you really think about Lup’s nice socks?” Taako asks a few minutes later. Lucretia raises both eyebrows at him, deadpan, and he shrugs with a mischievous grin before yelling in the general direction of the door, “Which, by the way, we knew the whole time, Lup.”
“Duh,” her voice comes, muffled. “I thought it added dramatic flair, though.”
Taako delivers a cheerful middle finger at the door.
“She can’t see that,” Lucretia says.
“Oh yes she can,” Taako says loftily, “Mage Hand, bitch,” then he runs his hand through his hair. It’s not braided anymore, just tethered at the bottom with a worn tie, but he’s kept it long. He doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says, sounding very tired, “I’m still mad at you.”
“That’s fair.”
“I’ll probably keep being mad at you for a while. And—I can’t just drop back in to how things were. But…I’ll give it a shot. That’s all I can say right now.”
Lucretia nods slowly. It’s better than she could have expected. “Hey, Taako, can I say something that will make you even more mad at me?”
“Probably not possible, so shoot.”
“I am sorry.” She gives a tight smile as she ducks her head. “And—letting you go. All of you, but I also just mean you, Taako. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” She shuffles her feet. “I missed you so damn much.”
When she looks back up, Taako’s expression is inscrutable. “You’re right. That does make me even more mad.” She shrugs self-deprecatingly. “But—I mean. Me too. At least when I remembered what I was missing.”
That’s when the tears she’s been predicting all along finally fall, and he doesn’t sling his arm around her shoulders like he would have once, but he does rest his hand on her head for a moment as she cries, and it’s more than enough.
It takes time. There’s years and years of hurt to repair all around, both on their end and hers. Whenever they meet up now, everything is so incredibly fragile, and she worries constantly that one misstep will ruin everything again. But that misstep doesn’t happen, and it’s two years after the Day of Story and Song that all of them meet together in Taako’s kitchen. It’s still not the same, and she doesn’t think it ever will be. They’re all different now, after all. But it’s still good, still better than anything she could have hoped for.
Taako bustles past her, hip-checking her out of the way, and stops in his tracks. “Lucy, darling, your hair is getting awfully scraggly at the ends there. Need a trim?”
She touches her hands to the ends and smiles. “I don’t know. I was thinking about growing it out.”
Taako looks at her, then he smiles too, a bit too sharp for him not to be planning something. “Oh, this is going to be good.”
And the impossible, wonderful thing is, for all that the concept would have seemed foreign to the person who started cutting her hair short in the first place, he's absolutely right.