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It’d been two months.
Lucretia glanced up at the mural to find fourteen eyes staring back. She ducked her head, flicking her wrist. The image shifted.
She wondered how much longer it’d be before she could look at that painting again without feeling nauseous. In her days as the Director, she’d spent every lone moment looking at that mural, forcing herself to look over each and every face, forcing herself to fuel her anguish, her mission on this plane.
Sickly, she caught herself longing for those days. She repulsed at the concept: alone, working, aching, lying, just to get by, to save her family. At least then she’d had hope that everything could go back to normal. Wartorn, bitter hope, but still hope.
It’d been two months.
Lucretia had put up with so much, so much for this family. As she sat at her desk, she felt her own eyes boring into her back, the feeling of right but wrong rising in her chest once again. It was like finding a toy after losing it for months, but there being something off about it. The stitching was out of place just so slightly, the color just a tad darker or lighter. Wrong.
That doll was her family. She had tried, Lucretia had tried so hard to make this as easy for them as possible. She had erased the relics, giving them a clear conscience. She had erased the journey, giving them a fresh start. She had inserted them into safe places, fitting places, the likes of which she had researched endlessly in every effort to get it right. She had gone scouring every night to acquire enough of this world’s money for each of their new homes. She gave Magnus a quaint town with friendly residents that thrived on new ideas! A place he could finally express his creativity without the glare of corporate influence over his head. Merle, what he’d always wanted: a house on the shore, free of responsibility and a taste of the impact that their twenty-first cycle had left on the dwarf. She gave Taako the best that she could muster: a chance to showcase his abilities to the world. She wished she could have bonded with him more over the century. Perhaps she would have been able to give him something better. Something safer.
She understood now that her worst decision in his favor had been hiring Sazed. Some part of her knew she had only done it to fill in the asymmetry of only seeing one person at the counter, but she refused to admit it to herself nonetheless.
Lucretia was ashamed that she knew how Sazed had turned out, and the shame was only heightened in that she had heard it from the grapevine, and not the victim himself.
Her most fatal mistake, though, was Lup, she knew that now. Every day as the Director, she would ask herself why she did it, and every day, she would respond with only “I had to.”
“I had to erase it all.” “I had to do it alone.” “I had to ditch Cam.” “I had to scout.” “I had to hire.” “I had to compromise.”
“I had to cheat.”
“I had to fake.”
“I had to kill, I had to break rules, I had to lie to their faces about the only other woman I’d learned to trust- ”
Lucretia clenched her fists against the desk. The clock read 2 am, and she knew, god she knew she had to just leave the bureau for the night, she’d known for hours, but she was so stapled to the seat and her breath was short and-
The Director stood up abruptly, forcing herself off of the chair as she took deep breaths, too deep, too sudden. She hardly acknowledged that her seat had almost toppled at the movement, and navigated around her desk undeterred.
He was out there. She knew he was. She had to go, she couldn’t hide all night.
Lucretia opened the door.
She could hear the vents whirring as she stepped into the hallway, every movement cause for nerve, praying she wouldn’t make noise on her way out.
She began her stroll around the bureau, eyes darting every now and then at every creak or bump.
She smelled it before anything, the smell of home. She was right near the hangers, she could go right now , but it was too much, it was always too much.
She turned to the cafeteria doors.
He heard her by the time she reached the kitchen door, still twenty feet from the counter. She knew he did. As much as he veiled his emotions, his ears were always a dead give away. Perhaps that was why he always wore that hat: anyone was harder to read by ears if one could only see a third of them.
She hesitated, placing a hand on the doorway, watching the elf fold a sheet of dough. He seemed to grow tired of the silence, lifting his head, back still to the woman.
“Come to apologize for the zillionth time?” He said impatiently, before looking back to his project, cutting up the folded material.
“What if I have?” Lucretia asked patiently.
“I’d tell you it’s a waste of time.”
“Then it won’t matter if I do it again.”
“Let me rephrase that,” The elf turned, cocking his hip, knife sitting lazily between his fingers. “It’s a waste of my time.”
Lucretia took a breath. “Look, I know what I did was..awful. I took too much and I shouldn’t have-”
“Stop,” The elf had a hand up in a motion mimicking his words, the other across the crest of his nose. The knife was on the counter. When he didn’t continue, Lucretia furrowed her brows.
“Stop..?”
“The fucking voice, yeah? Stop with the voice.”
Lucretia paused.
“What..voice?”
“That one. The ‘Madame Director’ voice, the one that sounds like you know better than everybody,” Taako scowled, jabbing a finger towards the human. “You don’t know shit about shit.”
Lucretia hesitated.
“Taako, I’d like to talk-”
“Still doing it,” He drawled, back to his baking. Lucretia took another breath.
“Taako, I want to talk about what happened.”
“Nothing to say,” He hit the button on the oven as it reached 00:01.
“Yes, there is. Look, what I did was unforgivable and-”
“Mm-m,” Taako hummed, holding up a finger, facing the oven. “No and. Your point is made. Go on,” He shooed.
Lucretia stared at the elf’s back, his apron tied in a messy double-knotted bow. As he bent to place the tray in the oven, she could see his spine poke through his shirt. When they’d first met, she remembered Merle, ever subtle, commenting on how he had never seen anyone before he and Lup that were ‘quite so damn scrawny,’ to which Taako had replied with only a bitter smile and said, “More for everyone else.”
Back in the present: “Don’t you have some papers to grade, Miz Director?”
“It’s 3 am, Taako.”
Taako turned, smiling and throwing his hands into the air.
“And yet I still can’t get any fuckin’ peace?”
He leveled his cynic smile at the woman, who braced herself against her pride.
“Taako, this is serious- ”
“Oh, forgive me, everything’s serious to miss busy over here, huh?” He laughed. “Hey joker, where’s your sense of fun? It follow the other thirty-two years down the shitter?”
“Taako, that’s not something to joke about,” Lucretia scolded, feeling her insides twist at the reminder of the years she lost.
“Oh, the tin man remembers what a joke is, now?” Taako laughed. “Tell me, what do you find funny? Think it’s funny to treat your family like toilers to do your bidding? How about ripping someone’s family away for no apparent reason? Oh! Or maybe sending people you’ve already stripped everything from into a motherfucking death trap ? Is that funny , tin man? You find this puppet show entertaining ?”
“Taako, I understand that my actions were upsetting, but-”
“No, you know what’s upsetting?” Taako placed his hands on the counter, his face a foot from Lucretia’s. “Upsetting is that my beautiful fucking sister got trapped for twelve years and the payoff of her getting her body back isn’t even good because every fucking time I look at her I’m reminded that we’re no longer identical! That’s what’s fucking upsetting! Tin man wanted a heart? Maybe stick with the one you had instead of ripping mine out of my fucking hands!”
The timer went off, beeping aimlessly in the silence of the room. Neither person moved. Lucretia realized she had stopped breathing.
“You two aren’t identical anymore?”
“Forget it,” Taako’s voice was quiet now as he turned to pull on the oven mitt. Lucretia could hear the pull in it.
“No, when did that happen? You never mentioned that before now.”
“Gee, I wonder why I didn’t mention that to the person who ruined my life,” Taako smiled, voice dripping with bitter and sarcasm. Lucretia took the blow solemnly, allowing her guts to tangle together. She remained silent. Eventually, Taako sighed, pulling out various syrups and what have you from the fridge.
“It was in Wonderland.”
Lucretia felt her esophagus close up at the name.
“They took some of my..discernibility, so to speak. And as stupid as you may think it, miss eighteen-going-on-eighty,” He sneered. Lucretia decided not to point out that she was not, in fact, eighty. “I almost didn’t do it. ‘Oh, selfish Taako, scared to loose his pretty-boy rep!’”
“I don’t think you’re selfish,” Lucretia remarked sadly. Taako only gave her a look.
“Newsflash: I am. And maybe I didn’t want to give up my recognizability, or maybe I still felt my connection to Lup, who fucking knows? Fuck, maybe being pretty is all I fucking had, ever thought of that ?”
His hands tightened on the chocolate syrup bottle. Lucretia could see, now, that he’d been making palmiers. Taako had made them for the crew way back when, and Magnus had always complained (later backed up by Merle, because he was nothing if not a bandwagoner when it came to food) that they were too plain. Taako had always defended that ‘that’s the way they’re supposed to be, dipshit,’ but during one particularly draining cycle, he and Lup had made them again and set up a station-style array of ice cream toppings for everyone to go around and decorate their plate with. Eventually it worked itself up to the twins making the mixtures themselves and serving them pre-decorated.
She guessed he must still remember their preferences.
“You were always the only one to remember, yet to this day you’re still clueless to shit ,” Taako muttered bitterly. After a moment of silence, he jerked his head, flipping his bangs out of his face.
“Whatever. Forget it.”
Lucretia watched him concernedly.
“Taako-”
“ What now ?” He complained, turning his head towards her, tray in hand.
She watched the plates of palmiers all fall into the trashcan one by one.
“Why are you..?” She gestured, eyebrows still furrowed. He glanced at what he was doing, then looked back at her as indifferent as ever.
“Bad batch.”
With that, he untied the apron, made sure the oven was off, hit the lights and left the bureau kitchen.
Lucretia stared ahead for a minute more. She had always known Taako to be bitter and rude, always understood that he distanced himself, sure; but Lucretia had never, in her one-hundred and twelve years of knowing him,
ever
seen Taako throw away a finished dish.