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When you arrive back at base, tired and tattered and full up of nothingness, you and the others follow Tally to her old room and watch her collect her things.
It feels eerily like a funeral; and in a way, it is.
This is the death of Tally Craven.
It’s one you’ve witnessed hundreds of times, in hundreds of haunted faces just like hers. Some were called happily, like Devon. Some were called in the desperation of battle, like Tally. But they were all the same to you -- all daughters whose lives were cut unforgivably short for the sole purpose of extending yours. The life that you were only living, now, to serve this great nation that was equal parts eager and unwilling to let you go. You’ve borrowed more lifetimes than you can remember and it never gets any easier, adding to your own personal death count in the service of this country that only allows you and your kind to exist within the confines of the military. This country that still, after all these centuries, seeks to control you, to use you, to mold and shape and brand you into the face of all its victories and all its failures (anyone who looks at you and sees a choice made willingly three hundred years ago isn’t paying close enough attention). You’ve forgotten how it must feel to have a life with any sort of meaning -- a life that means anything at all beyond what it can provide for America, for the world at large. Whether as a hero or as someone to blame.
But this kind of thinking leads to despair, and despair is not a thing that you are allowed to feel. It comes to you, always, when you accept a new Biddy into the fold: and, always, you swallow it whole before it can swallow you.
“I want to be alone right now,” Tally tells you, and the broken desperation in the sound of her voice (as familiar to you as it is forbidden) is enough to remind you of where you are, what is expected of you, and what duty Tally will soon learn she now must share with you and with the others for the rest of her life.
“There is no ‘alone’ anymore, Craven,” you respond quietly. You feel the heaviness in the truth of those words now more than ever as the faces of the Camarilla appear in your mind, the profane storms they sang into being, the nightmarish weapons they unleashed to announce their unthinkable return.
You should have seen it coming. They’d been the only constant in your life since you were a child and you were arrogant to assume you’d ever be rid of them (you wonder if one could ever exist without the other -- the hunter and the hunted, the power and the powerless). That arrogance had cost you more than just your own pride, but regret is too powerful an emotion to allow yourself to feel now. You siphon it away along with the despair, the emptiness, the nothingness, the numbness coming off Tally in waves, refusing to allow it to take root in the bottom of your gut. Refusing to feel, always. Always.
Tally is silent and sedate, weighted and slowed by the sudden and unexpected burden of your years, which makes it easier to catch her gaze fixed on the quilt draped over Private Collar’s bed, the necklace on Private Bellweather's dresser. A flash of something like anger, something like pity, whistles through you, and for a moment you’re unsure if it’s hers or yours.
“What will happen to their things?” Tally asks you, and it’s the first time she’s looked you in the eye for hours. “I would take them, but I don’t imagine they'll pass inspection where I’m going,” she adds, ruefully.
“The quilt shouldn’t have passed inspection here,” you tell her, matter-of-factly. Its presence in this room is a side-effect of Anacostia’s blind eye, undoubtedly. “Any possessions left behind by Private Bellweather or Private Collar will be returned to their families. If,” you begin after a pause, a little softer, “there is something particular that you would like to take with you, I will not object. Especially something that should have been disposed of during inspection.” Before Tally can thank you, you add, “But there is a place for such things, and it will not be in your new suite. Come.”
After collecting Collar's blanket and Bellweather's necklace, she follows you wordlessly out of the room and you can feel her confusion as if it were your own. You ignore it. You’re uncertain why you even offered this in the first place. Perhaps it’s because it’s the right thing to do, as Anacostia might say -- perhaps Tally’s sacrifice to you warrants a sacrifice of your own in kind. Or perhaps it is an unwelcome side-effect of the weakness you always feel when your lives are passed between daughters, made even more acute by the particular poignancy of Tally’s unique sacrifice (one made with more honor than you would have ever dreamt a cadet capable of).
The walk to the edge of Fort Salem is a slow and silent one -- and one you’ve been making for hundreds of years to this very particular spot, tucked away behind a hill. You lead Tally and the others round to the other side of the incline where a pair of worn, wooden doors sits almost hidden in the overgrowth of grass and ivy. When you turn to your daughters they understand that all but you and Tally must remain outside (a distant mirroring of a similar scene some fifteen years ago when you brought Anacostia here for the first time -- another consequence of unwanted sentimentality).
“What is this?” Tally asks, disbelief etched into her face as the doors shut behind the two of you and you are alone in the dimness of the cellar. “This has been here the whole time?”
“A hobby of mine,” you confess, nodding at the rows and rows of kegs revealed in the muted lighting, stacked carefully against cobblestone walls that you laid yourself -- stone by stone -- over two hundred years ago. “I’ve been known to espouse the belief that whiskey is the one thing civilians got right.” You watch Tally as she takes in the scene unfolding around her, connecting dots that she never even knew were there. “Of course, I made it better,” you cannot stop yourself from adding, the barest suggestion of humor touching your tone. “Some might say.”
“You come here to drink?” Tally asks and accuses at the same time, clutching Collar’s blanket to her chest like a Cession churchgoer might clutch a string of pearls.
“To drink,” you concede, glancing purposefully at the blanket, “and to feel.”
Tally begins to crumble as she understands what exactly it is you are giving her -- sharing with her -- and the moisture shining in her eyes has as much to do with grief as it does gratitude. The link between you vibrates with the force of it and you find that moisture gathering at the corners of your own eyes as a result. You would normally blink it away but here, in this place, you allow yourself the privilege of feeling its presence.
“My daughters exercise control over their emotions. Master them, just as I have. Just as you will,” you tell her, not ungently. “But this place is sacred. This place does not have the watchful eyes of our sisters, nor the expectations of our country. Here,” you begin, reaching for two glasses from a cabinet carved into the wall, “we are who we are, without the pressure of who we have to be.”
Tally is soundless as she watches you fill the glasses with the sparkling amber liquid. When you offer her a glass she takes it slowly, reluctant to let go of Collar’s blanket even with just one hand.
“To honor,” you say, proposing a toast. “To duty. To sacrifice.”
“To wasted potential,” Tally adds, bitterly, and you feel that fire igniting within her again because it ignites within you, now, too.
“To wasted potential,” you echo, darkly, and drink.
When both your glasses are drained, you lead Tally through the maze of kegs to an aged door at the farthest corner of the cellar. “The others have seen this place in the shared space of our minds, but none have entered.” You tell her this because you want her to understand your sacrifice. You want her to understand this piece of privacy that none -- not even Anacostia -- have been invited to share. Tally Craven has placed an incredible amount of trust in you in an act of ultimate selflessness and bravery and it is your heart (ancient and broken and held together by obligation as it is) that tells you that she is the only witch worthy of an offering in return.
(You owe her nothing, you remind yourself: even as you feel the untruth in it, even as you open the door.)
It is a small and dusty room with a wooden table and chair positioned at its center. There are boxes and weapons and articles of clothing neatly lining the room’s perimeter, but Tally’s attention is immediately called to the table. On the table is a box, and in the box is, “All that is left of my sister,” you supply for Tally, her power of Knowing all but erased when her identity was partially absorbed into you ( wasted potential, the memory of her toast echoes unbidden through your mind). “The only thing they couldn’t burn.”
Tally enters the room with a silent reverence, the tears carving paths down her pallid cheeks a mixture of hers and your own. “I see it,” she tells you, delicately. “Somehow, I see it.” A pentagram necklace, one that, thanks to the link between your minds, Tally can see -- can feel. You stand motionlessly as she draws nearer to you, as the memories continue to unfold one after another and she’s saying, “There are other things here. Other tokens. This is -- ” she falters, looks up at you, “ -- this is how you keep them alive. Everyone. Everyone that you’ve lost over the centuries. It’s a graveyard. No, no,” she stops, correcting herself, “it’s a memorial.”
“It is both,” you confirm. “It is also the safest place for the tokens that you carry. I cannot promise that you will be given access to this room again, but you can rest assured that here, not only will they be safe,” you promise her, solemnly, “but they will also be in the most hallowed company.”
“You’ve lost everyone,” Tally whispers. “I can see them all, feel them all. How do you do it? How do you -- how do you make it go away? How do you -- stop feeling it?”
“You don’t,” you tell her, without hesitation. “You feel it and you turn those feelings into actions, and you turn those actions into honor. And you make damn sure,” you say, with a sudden, fierce intensity, “that you are worthy of carrying that honor in their name. Always.”
Tally’s eyes shine with a renewal of purpose at the mention of honor (just as you knew they would) and she hands you the quilt and the bauble, nodding her consent for you to find a place for them within the room. “Thank you,” she murmurs, “for showing me how to keep their memories safe.”
“Thank you,” you answer, “for your sacrifice.”
“It is my honor.”
“No,” you correct, “it is mine.”
It will be a new challenge, you realize, and perhaps your greatest yet. One that you will face for the rest of your life.
To be worthy of that honor.
To be worthy of Tally Craven’s sacrifice.