Chapter Text
The first time Lucretia loses her family is the day the Starblaster takes flight. She watches as the force she would come to call the Hunger consumes her plane of existence. Every family member—her parents and her sister and her second cousins three times removed who she's never met—and every school friend and every neighbor, gone. Just like that.
The crew of the Starblaster doesn’t mourn, not right then. It’s too much, the uncertainty and then the absolute, deafening certainty. Instead they do what they can, not knowing, that first cycle, when the Hunger would come or what would happen after. It’s a few cycles in by the time Lucretia allows herself to truly process that her world, like the world of animals and each subsequent world they’ve visited, is truly gone.
The second time Lucretia loses her family, it’s after 65 years with them, over three times the amount of life she lived on her home world. She had thought that nothing could be worse than watching her family die, but now she knows better: the only thing worse than watching your family die is not watching. She hides in the ship, this ship that was theirs but is now hers, running and hiding and fighting and learning how to be all seven parts of a crew without knowing where the other six are. She wants to believe they’re still alive, that Davenport has assembled the crew (or even a part of it, she begs whatever god might be listening, or even just one) and is blazing a trail back to her. But she has too much faith in her family; she knows if even one of them were still alive, they’d find their way back. And after five months of nothing, she knows that they’re dead.
She’s the survivor.
She teaches herself to fly the ship, from battered manuals in filing cabinets that she has to pry open with a screwdriver (she breaks twelve of Lup’s hairpins trying to pick the lock and wishes with all her heart that Lup were there to be angry with her) and from Davenport’s scribblings in his captain’s log (wanting desperately to be able to make fun of him for his terrible penmanship and nonsensical shorthand). She patches up the ship the best she can, and she keeps herself alive, because the only way she’ll be able to see her family again is if she survives.
She's their only hope.
The third time Lucretia loses her family, it’s her fault.
Barry and Lup aren’t, she supposes. Lup disappeared on her own, and Barry went missing shortly after she fed her journals to Fisher—she suspects his body is lying in a ditch somewhere, and it breaks her heart to think of Barry, so full of hope and life and love, committing suicide as soon as he realized what was happening, valuing the memory of Lup and the crew and all they’d done together more than his own corporeal form.
But the others, those are her burdens.
She finds a community of beach dwarves, hoping that Merle will enjoy the peaceful life he well deserves after so many years aboard the ship. She picks out a town for Magnus; in her search for the right place, her two requirements are the availability of craftsfolk and the presence of a dog park. She creates a home and a show and a spotlight for Taako, knowing that a cheering crowd will never begin to make up for what Taako has lost, but hoping against hope that maybe Taako’s caravan will take him to whatever dark corner of the world Lup has been hiding in. His mind wouldn’t recognize her, but his soul, Lucretia convinces herself, his soul would know his sister anywhere.
She tells herself it’s a kindness to Davenport to keep him close; she’s protecting this broken man from the world he helped to save; he’d never survive on his own, not with how badly she damaged him. But in truth, it’s a kindness to herself, the last prick of selfishness she can afford. Her family is gone, splintered to the corners of this world that isn’t hers but is now theirs, and leaving Merle, Magnus, and Taako behind in their new homes broke her heart. She pressed a kiss to each of their foreheads as they slept, silently promising that she’d see them again, that she’d be able to explain, that they’d be a family again.
She can’t do that to Davenport. Not him, too.
So she keeps him close. Rumors spread across the Bureau about why the Director keeps a halfwit gnome by her side, rumors that he’s her lover or that he’s faking his insanity. Once she hears a whisper that lands a little too close to the truth, that the Director did something to Davenport to make him like this and now she feels bad, that’s why she keeps him around. It would break her heart, except that by now she’s accustomed to the pain of making the hard call that no one understands. So she lets her underlings whisper and theorize; as long as they do their work, she won’t stop them from trying to guess her motives.
She knows they’ll never get it right. She made sure of that.
The fourth time Lucretia loses her family, it’s when they remember what she did.
Taako is pointing his staff (Lup’s staff, she wants to remind him, except that she knows he already remembers too much right now) at her, and counting down, and cursing and raging and hovering on the verge of crying. She says the words that she feels she ought to say, but there’s no passion in her voice, not the way she expected there’d be if she were threatened with death by a man who is without a doubt furious enough to follow through.
She’s trusted her judgment all these years, and look where that’s landed her.
So she’ll trust Taako’s.
If he deems her crimes worthy of death, then she’ll die at his hand with the knowledge that it’s what she deserves. If he allows her to live, she swears to herself in this moment that she will do whatever it takes to make this world better. She has no more regard for her own well-being. Everything she does now is for her family.
Magnus talks Taako into lowering his staff, and Lucretia watches as something even more terrifying than rage crosses Taako’s face: apathy. She’s seen his apathy, his complete lack of consideration for anyone except the people he defines as his. It’s never scared her like this before, though; she’s never been on the far side of that dividing line.
But she deserves it. After all, she’s the one who robbed him of the one person who has always been his.
She’ll trust Taako’s judgment. She’ll take whatever he decides that she deserves. Death, perhaps, or imprisonment. Hatred, certainly. She knows her family is lost to her, in a way that she’s never lost a family before.
She deserves no forgiveness for what she’s done to them.