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Lucretia is sobbing in her sleep.
Taako tells himself he doesn’t care, tells himself she deserves whatever pain she is feeling, tells himself that he’s only waking her up so that he can get some sleep himself. He tells himself that it doesn’t hurt to hear her cry.
That’s what he tells himself.
He doesn’t know why he let Magnus talk him into this visit in the first place, this obvious, ham-fisted attempt at reconciliation between them. Maybe it’s because he knew Magnus would never stop pestering, or maybe it’s just that he didn’t want to let the guy down. He tries so hard, Magnus does, to see the best in everyone, to help. His stubbornness and his sincerity make him a difficult person to turn down, even for Taako.
Whatever the reason, he is here in Magnus’s house, awkwardly sharing a room with Lucretia after months of carefully avoiding being in the same space with her for more than a minute at a time. Dinner was an exercise in endurance and small talk, then Magnus oh-sorry-there's-only-one-spare-room-and-the-dogs-hog-all-the-couches Burnsides bade them good night as though he wasn't sending two people who have barely spoken a word to each other all year off to share a bedroom. They didn’t speak at all as they got ready for bed, except for a polite inquiry from Lucretia about turning out the light.
It’s going about as well as Taako expected it to go.
And now he’s lying on his bed, staring at a ceiling that Magnus has decorated with tiny glow-in-the-dark stars, and listening to Lucretia cry quietly, desperately, into her pillow. It's only a few minutes before he throws off his covers, crosses the room to her bed.
“Hey, Lucretia,” he says as he kneels next to her. She is curled into a ball, her hands tucked in close to her chest, and she doesn’t respond at all to his voice.
“Creesh. Keesha.”
He shakes her shoulder, not bothering to be gentle. “Hey, Madam Director, wake up.”
She comes to with a gasp, her hands clutching his wrists, just for a second, before she realizes where she is and lets go.
“Oh. Taako. I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”
“I’d have to have been asleep in the first place for you to wake me. Never got that far.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Well.”
That should be the end of it. He should go back to his bed, try to get some sleep. He doesn’t care what she was dreaming about, what made her cry like that.
But her breath is still coming in short, sharp gasps, and she’s wrapped her arms tight around herself as though she’ll fly apart if she lets go.
Taako knows that feeling—he’s had it himself often enough.
So instead, he sighs and asks,
“Which cycle?”
She doesn’t look at him, just closes her eyes and shakes her head.
“Taako, we don’t have to talk about this, you can go back to sleep—”
“Not if I have to wake you up again when you fall right back into it. Which cycle? Sixty-five?” It’s the most obvious guess; he’s sure her year alone must haunt her, especially since she’s lived a different, self-inflicted version of that solitude for the last ten years.
She shakes her head, slowly. “No. Fifty-eight.”
Oh. Shit.
The Ferans.
It had been a particularly bad cycle, three of them captured only two months into the year. The Ferans were one of the more advanced cultures they’d run into over the cycles, but their magic was dark and twisted—they scavenged abilities and skills by taking pieces out of the people they captured to use as spell components. They’d taken Taako’s eyes, fascinated by elven dark-vision. They’d ripped Magnus’s heart out of his chest.
And they’d taken Lucretia’s hands.
Taako had nightmares for months afterwards about that day, being strapped to a table, unable to see, unable to move, forced to listen helplessly as Lucretia pleaded with their captors to take anything, anything but that—
He sighs.
“Let me see your hands.”
“Taako, you don’t have to—”
“Give me your damn hands, Lucretia.”
She holds out her hands to him—they’re shaking, although she tries her best to hide it. Taako takes them in his, and he is struck at once by how they have changed. Her hands feel—delicate, in a way that they never used to before. Her skin is softer, a little looser, webs of fine lines spread over knuckles just a little more prominent than they used to be.
And it hits him, suddenly, how much she has aged.
Lucretia is—not old, not frail. But she is not twenty anymore. After a century suspended in time, she is moving through her life at that stupidly fast pace that humans have. Even if she lives to be very old, she only has a few decades left.
It makes him angry, irrationally so.
He is still furious with her for what she did, all she took from him. He’s not ready to forgive her, not even close, and he hates this reminder that his forgiveness has a deadline.
This would all be easier, he thinks, if he loved her less.
He squeezes her hands, perhaps less gently than he would have twelve years ago. “You feel that? Your hands are right here. My eyes are back in my head, and I can see your stupid wrinkled face. And those people are long gone.”
They had gotten the Light that cycle—but after seeing what the Ferans had done to Taako and Magnus and Lucy, Barry and Lup left one of Taako’s fake Lights in the lab they rescued Taako from. The first column of the Hunger came down right on top of it, as Lup watched from the deck of the Starblaster with hard eyes.
Lucretia takes a deep, shuddering breath. Her eyes are closed, her brow furrowed, and she grips his hands tight enough to hurt.
“That’s it,” he says. “Hold on as tight as you need to.”
They stay like that for a long time, holding hands in the dark, the silence broken only by Lucretia’s hitched breathing. Taako catches himself rubbing his thumb over her knuckles, something he’s done with Lup when she has nightmares, a small, continuous sensation to help anchor her back in her body.
Slowly, Lucretia’s breathing returns to normal, and her grip on his hands loosens.
“Better?”
Lucretia nods. She finally opens her eyes and looks at him, really looks at him, and for once he meets her gaze with no challenge or anger at all.
What an odd pair they are, Taako thinks. Both broken and clumsily repaired in so many different ways. Both so good at hurting each other, whether they mean to or not.
Taako gives Lucretia’s hands a final squeeze and lets go. But he doesn’t go back to his bed, yet. Instead he settles himself against the side of the bed facing away from Lucretia, leaning his back against the mattress. It’s another thing he’s done for Lup, and she for him, on hard nights—staying close for a little while, a reminder that they’re not alone.
Lucretia takes a breath, as though she’s about to say something—to ask him what he’s doing, maybe. But she stops, and they sit, she on the bed and he on the floor, listening to the night silence, and Magnus’s distant snoring.
“Taako, can I say something?” Lucretia says finally.
“Sure.”
“It might make you angry.”
He suppresses a laugh. Everything she says makes him angry, recently.
“Tonight, you get a pass,” he says.
He hears her take a deep breath behind him, steeling herself for whatever she’s about to say. He can just picture what she must look like right now, the way she bites her lip when she’s nervous, worries her cuticles with her fingers.
They are different people than they were, ten years ago, but in some ways he still knows her so, so well.
Lucretia is silent for so long that he thinks that maybe she lost her nerve. But finally, she speaks.
“I miss you.”
Taako’s not sure what he was expecting—more apologies, maybe, because that seems to be all she has to say to him now. But whatever he might have been expecting, it wasn’t that.
“I know I don’t have any right to miss you, after what I did,” she says. “And I don’t…I’m not asking anything of you. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me. But I just…I miss you. I’ve missed you all so much.”
Taako’s mind is full, suddenly, of images of the Lucretia he used to know—arguing with her over the papers she’d left strewn across the table just before dinner, shooing her out of the kitchen when she tried to write down his recipes, teaching her how to properly make tea. The way her whole face changed when she smiled.
They are different people than they were, ten years ago.
Too much has happened, too much as been lost, for them to go back to what they were before.
But maybe. Someday.
“You know what, Luce? Since we’re being honest?” Taako pauses, takes a deep breath. “I miss you, too.”
They don’t say anything else, after that.
What else is there to say?
Eventually, Taako returns to his bed, and Lucretia curls back up under her covers, but no longer in that tight, protective ball she’d pulled herself into before.
“Taako?” she says, after a moment’s silence.
“Mm?”
“Thank you.”
Taako lies back on his bed, looking up at Magnus’s little stars.
It hasn’t changed anything, their exchange tonight. It’s not forgiveness. Not yet.
But maybe it’s a start.
“You’re welcome,” Taako says.