Chapter Text
“Sheesh, Red, are you even trying?”
Tally Craven, former cadet in the United States Armed Forces and current fugitive from the same, blanched under the criticism, her head whipping up to fix its critic with a glare.
“Of course I’m trying, Nicte,” she shot back through gritted teeth. “This is just harder than it looks!”
“It’s supposed to be easier for a Knower. You’re supposed to be more detail-oriented than most!”
Tally hung her head, seething at the slight, and flicked the silver lighter in her clenched fist closed with more force than was strictly necessary. The spring ground against itself audibly, but at least held. Around her, Tally heard the telltale sounds of her comrades in various stages of their own, more successful Workings.
Their glamoured federal transport vehicle, now disguised as a nondescript van, was pulled over and concealed behind that night’s campsite while the former cadets, dodgers, and refugees practiced a more advanced version of the Spree’s pyro-shapeshifting technique under the instruction of convicted terrorist—and the Work’s inventor—Nicte Batan. Nicte and Scylla Ramshorn, as former Spree leader and member/dodger, respectively, had insisted last week that the rest of their group learn this Working to better their chances at deception and thus of survival as they roamed the Cession looking for a safe point to enter the western United States and rally more Spree and dodgers to their cause. With the exception of the hesitant former cadets, whose military training had been largely forged in the fires of anti-Spree sentiment, the party had agreed readily and taken to the exercise with varying degrees of success.
Adil and Khalida, perhaps because they themselves had spent so much time fleeing the Camarilla when the violent extremist group had sought their people’s genocide in the Tarim, proved quick studies of the basic version of the Work they’d all learned last week—using a lighter to assume the face of someone in front of them. Quinn, an accomplished dodger used to both off-Canon Work and highly-specialized concealment, learned it quickly as well. Of their ex-Army unit, Abigail, scrupulous and shrewd as always, hadn’t picked up the basic version as quickly as Adil, Khalida, and Quinn had, but she was the first of their whole party to nail the advanced version today—using a lighter to conjure the face of someone not immediately visible this time, but rather from memory. Her expedience this round was likely because she’d been disappointed that she hadn’t been first the last time and had pushed herself the hardest to prove herself now: She smiled smugly wearing her mother’s face, an expression that wasn’t particularly foreign on the countenance of even this façade of General Petra Bellweather. Raelle, wary no doubt because pyro-shapeshifting had been used against her the most frequently of the bunch, had been hesitant to try the basic Working at all, but seemed to have gotten the hang of it now: “She” was clapping Scylla on the back heartily while wearing her father’s face, much to Scylla’s delight. (This was especially bizarre, because Quinn’s own duplication of Edwin Collar chuckled warmly as “he” watched the exchange from a few feet away.)
That left Tally, who, although she hadn’t taken terribly long to master the basic exercise last week—studying Scylla closely before bringing her lighter to her face and replacing it with an exact copy of the dodger’s, then sticking out her tongue cheekily—was struggling more than everyone else with the advanced Working. Like her unit-mates, she had thought to focus on and re-cast a parent’s countenance in the fires of her magic, but each time she tried, she found it was harder to remember her mother’s face than she’d thought it would be. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised given their strained relationship even before Tally had gone on the lamb for allegedly murdering the Vice President’s daughter, but it still stung a bit. Tally sighed in exasperation and gnawed on the inside of her cheek.
“Think of someone whose face you’ve memorized,” Nicte instructed. “It’ll need to be someone you’ve watched closely and whose expressions and mannerisms you’re familiar enough with to recreate without much conscious thought.” Tally glanced at Nicte from the sides of her eyes at that, noting that the other woman’s own eyes were teasing and not liking at all why that might be. Irritably, Tally spun her wrist sharply until the lighter cracked open once more, drew it to her chin, and stiffly flicked the wheel.
Nicte’s face bloomed from the flames along Tally’s jaw, the surliness of Tally’s expression in that moment feeling particularly appropriate on her approximation of Nicte’s face as the fire burned itself out along the back of her neck. Far less apropos, however, was Abigail’s amused snort coming from General Bellweather over the real Nicte’s shoulder.
“Cute,” Nicte muttered with a theatrical roll of her eyes. “But you’re supposed to recreate someone who isn’there, remember? What are you going to do if you’re ducking into a broom closet or something and there’s no one there for you to draw a face from?”
Tally huffed, annoyed as much by this whole lesson as she was by the fact that Nicte had an irritatingly good point. The flames began at her jaw again and when they dissipated, Tally’s own face had returned.
“Come on, Tal, there must be someone whose face you know well enough that you don’t need to see it.” Raelle’s nickname for Tally sounded odd coming from Edwin’s lips, but Tally smiled tightly to “her” just the same.
“Try Gregorio, Tal. Goddess knows he’s been hanging around you enough since Samhain.” Now the nickname and the way “Abi’s” eyebrows waggled suggestively seemed strange coming from Petra. Nicte arched a brow that made her smile appear more like a leer.
“A friend,” Tally ground out stiffly before sighing again. “I’ll try M. I’ve always admired their poise.
Another flick of the wheel, another line of flames edging from her chin to the back of her neck, and…
Rae’s Edwin cocked “his” head and fished in “his” pocket for a scrying mirror. “Not… erm… quite.”
When “he” flashed it in Tally’s direction, she groaned. Instead of M’s face, all angular, attractive lines and glowing, confident eyes, was…
“Well, a blob person can help if you really need to get out of a fix without being recognized, Tally,” Scylla supplied helpfully.
“Blob person” was right. Tally had at least gotten M’s close-cropped buzzcut right, but the rest looked… faintly as if someone had tried to sculpt M from mashed potatoes. Tally hastily ran the flame along her jaw again to end her downright offensive attempt of emulating M. She resisted the urge to stamp her foot like a child. Why couldn’t she get this?!
A cold, cruel voice in Tally’s mind whispered that this was just another way she was failing her new coven.
Since the ragtag group had escaped federal transport two months prior to abscond into the less-traceable wilds of the Cession, Tally had been… off. Some aspects of it were easier to cover than others: Most of the time, she concealed her nagging sorrow, terrible guilt, and alarming self-deprecation with a meticulous veneer of saccharine optimism that passed as her old, pre-Camarilla-attack self to everyone except her sisters, who knew her too well to fall for it. No doubt sensing that she wasn’t ready to discuss it, though, they let her be, but still found small ways to try and cheer her: For instance, knowing Tally shared her love for horror novels, Raelle had dug a tattered copy of Frankenstein out of a book-drop bin outside a subway station for them to share last month; Abigail had tested her pyro-shapeshifting last week by entering a gas station in disguise and had brought back Tally’s favorite chocolate bar. Trickier to mask, though, were the nightmares from which Tally woke screaming the name of their fallen General, especially because they all slept in such close quarters these days whether stretching out on the bus seats or clustering outside on finer nights under thin, canvas canopies. Rather than confess to her sisters that apparently, part of the now sickeningly-complete severance of her bond to the late General Alder was that she continued to dream the woman’s memories somehow, Tally hedged that she was merely dreaming about the woman’s death. If anyone thought to comment on the fact that Tally called out General Alder’s first name in her waking nightmares, they elected not to do so. Nevertheless, Tally hadn’t failed to notice that it was often Nicte who laid a gentle hand on her shoulder when Tally woke from these nightmares, and Nicte who seemed to watch her thoughtfully in the moonlight as Tally tried, rarely with any success, to fall back asleep.
What she couldn’t cover, though, was the sudden unreliability of her magic.
Although her Sight remained more or less intact—something to do with its more organic nature, Quinn had explained—Tally’s other Workings often, unpredictably, failed. Her Seed sounds were perfect after her years in Basic and then War College, but it was as if she were trying to braid power into them from a mysteriously-depleted wellspring of magic. She began assessing herself constantly to try and get to the source of the interference, but she consistently came up empty, with no explanation for why her reserves of magic seemed to empty suddenly even when she refrained from using them for anything except the most necessary tasks.
They didn’t say it, but after several of her attempts at the pyro-shapeshifting had suddenly guttered out like a weak candle flame last week, her new coven seemed to have tacitly agreed that Tally should remain on guard duty, and that any less “organic” Work should be taken up by any of the others before it fell to her. Naturally, this benching did nothing for Tally’s mercurial mood, which had lately begun to reel wildly, without much prompting, from flares of white-hot with anger or free-falls into soul-deep depression.
In short, Tally felt utterly, completely useless right when she knew the people she cared for needed her the most. The result was that everyone—with the exception of Nicte, of course—tended to walk on eggshells around Tally these days.
Nicte’s smirk now soured Tally’s mood even further, and then she made it worse by talking. “Are you really telling me, Dimples, that there isn’t one person outside this merry band of rebels whose face you know at least as well as your own? No one you’ve caught yourself watching when they weren’t looking?” To a casual observer, the ex-Spree terrorist’s tone would seem completely innocent; to Tally, not so much. Nicte’s sharp eyes dropped to inspect her fingernails in a performance of nonchalance even as her words stayed perfectly poised to goad Tally. “No one you’ve dreamed about, even?”
Tally’s sharp intake of air sounded like a hiss as it wound between the edges of her clenched teeth. Her eyes dropped to Nicte’s nails as well, and she was suddenly struck by the phantom sensation of her nails ghosting down Tally’s cheek, murmuring things Tally longed to hear. A cruelly perfect copy of her strumming fingertips along Tally’s skin that made her ache to touch hers in return. Nicte’s cruelly perfect copy, in fact: a delusion delivered from above by a seemingly-innocuous colony of bespelled bats weaving in and out of a thick canopy of trees. Tally shook her head sharply, as if doing so would prove to herself that there was no one there to stoke her cheek, to look intently into her eyes and speak of unbreakable, inevitable connection… that there never had been, not really. Tally swallowed heavily, refusing to take Nicte’s bait.
Quinn-Edwin perked up from a few yards away as “he” set about readying a firepit. “It’s sort of like riding a bike, honey. It really does get easier after you do it the first time.” Adil, wearing the face of a Tarim elder Tally didn’t know, nodded in agreement.
“You can do it, Tal!” Petra Bellweather chirped uncharacteristically.
Tally swallowed another lump in her throat. In this moment, her friends’ belief in her, combined with the ease with which they all seemed able to accomplish this task without feeling so utterly haunted, grated along her skin like sandpaper.
Rae and Abi no doubt felt that they had seen this side of Tally before, in the immediate aftermath of the order to Windshear a truck carrying Spree artillery and civilian hostages. Tally suspected that they had disseminated that information to the others in their party after a particularly scathing comment from Tally weeks prior, urging them to give her time, perhaps. But in fact, her unit did not understand. Devastating as that order had been, those civilians had been strangers to Tally. They hadn’t been a shy, sweet, earnest new witch who gravitated toward Tally to show her how to enter a witch’s world, mistakenly trusting Tally to keep her safe once that entrance had been made.
And the execution of that order hadn’t cost Tally—cost everyone—Sarah Alder.
And then, of course, here was Nicte, leering up at her with eyes that seemed to know what even Rae and Abi didn’t, why this particular task was so difficult for her. It was suddenly all too much.
The wheel had been struck before Tally was even actively aware that she’d lifted the lighter. This time, Tally was seized by the wild desire for the flames to hurt her. She noticed, dimly as the fire licked along her cheeks, that she’d scored her thumb along the sharp edge of the lid when she’d flipped it open so aggressively. She welcomed the sharp bite of it and then pressed her thumb cruelly into the knuckle of her index finger to heighten the pain.
Tally knew she’d gotten it right this time by the sudden, perfect stillness of everyone gathered around her, certainly a fitting response to the unexpected appearance of a dead woman in their midst.
Tally’s vision swam, but she thrust her jaw forward stubbornly and turned her gaze skyward in an effort to stave off tears. Her right cheek itched. Out of the corner of her eye, Tally watched “Petra’s” hand rise to brush a careful fingertip along that cheek. She recoiled from the gentle touch. “Oh, Tal…”
Tally barely checked a sob before she hurled the lighter at a nearby tree with as much force as she could muster and whirled on her heel to stalk into the forest.
She let herself get 30 yards or so before she nudged the place in her magic where her Sight dwelled. There. A little over a mile away, Tally felt as much as she Saw a stream cutting a gentle, sweeping line through the trees. She knew, realistically, that it was foolish to travel far from camp on her own, but her Sight also confirmed that there was no one for miles, and at least she felt she could still trust that part of her magic: no Camarilla, no civilians, no one. Good. Tally gritted her teeth as she set off for a narrow clearing she sensed along the stream.
It took less than half an hour to reach, less time than it should have because Tally kept herself marching at a brutal pace, relishing in the sting of mountain air through lungs she wouldn’t allow to rest, the bite of brambles she didn’t bother to block from tearing at her skin.
Well.
That was true at least in the first ten minutes or so, before she remembered whose skin she was wearing. Her fingertips tenderly stroked a shallow cut along her knuckles from an unnoticed blackberry bush several yards back, a silent apology whose guilt struck her to her core. Upon the realization of what she was doing, Tally growled petulantly, furious with herself for flinging away the lighter because now she was stuck in this guise until she returned to camp and borrowed one from someone else to put herself right. Perfect. What a moronshe was.
She was flagellating herself so viciously that she very nearly stepped off into the damned stream. She looked down just in time to prevent her boot from sinking into the water, then froze at the sight of the reflection that gazed so very seriously—accurately, she mused, her lips thinning—back at her.
Tally hated herself for being so utterly transfixed by those eyes, so impossibly, gloriously blue.
She sank to her knees then, not caring—barely even noticing—when her pant legs grew instantly soaked in the rivulets of chilly mountain meltwater. Freezing mud coated her knees and the toes of her boots, but Tally couldn’t bring herself to care about this, either, even when her teeth began to chatter. All she could see, all she ever wanted to see, was the face of Sarah Alder regarding her from the water’s surface.
Blue eyes, perfect, arching brows, the firm line of her jaw, comforting somehow in its severity. Signature, tight braid. And…
“Oh,” Tally muttered dully, finally understanding the itch across her right cheek. She closed her eyes as she grazed her own fingers along the length of a shallow gash there. The mark from a Scourge, its bearer too reluctant to inflict any real damage to the body even as she detonated the life, the career, the legacy. Too reverent, too covetous to overcome an urge to protect at all costs, even in the pursuit of a flimsy justice. Shallow. Another apology written in blood that she had unknowingly carried into this Working.
Would this be it, then? Would Sarah Alder live on in Tally’s memory as forever wounded by Tally’s own hand? She didn’t bother to mask the sob this time. There was no one here to judge her for how broken it sounded anyway.
When it was in Alder’s voice, Tally cut it off immediately with a strangled gasp. She couldn’t bear the sound.
Tally leveled her weight onto one hand, sinking it deep into the frigid mud below, masochistically grateful for the sting of it before everything below her wrist went suddenly numb from the cold. Her other hand rose of its own accord to skim the surface of the water, gently stroking the reflection of General Alder’s marked cheek.
“I’m sorry. Goddess, I’m so sorry. How could I have been so stupid?”
Somehow it hurt worse because Tally had so desperately wanted this voice to express remorse before everything had gone so wrong.
The movement of the water over and between her fingertips felt real, lifelike, like the flutter of the pulse that had stopped two months ago when Tally, her unit, and Anacostia Quartermaine had delivered Alder to the Mycelium. Or at least, it felt like that until that hand went numb, too.
Tally didn’t know how long she stayed there, shivering, staring into Alder’s reflection in the current. The breadth of her grief, of tears she couldn’t afford to shed for Alder kept her rooted to the spot. Alder had told her once, the night the Biddy bond had been severed, that Tally would feel the loss of her as she might feel the loss of a child, or a mother. Except it hadn’t felt like that then, and then it hadn’t felt like that when she’d truly lost her the night the Camarilla attacked Fort Salem. It felt like the loss of her heart. Her soul, her drive, the things she trusted to direct her, challenge her, and motivate her to become something better than what she was. What remained was a hollow shell stitched jaggedly together by remorse.
She would have been content to stay there all evening, longer. She would have. If the reflection hadn’t blinked back at her, eyes impossibly affectionate, soft when they should logically reflect Tally’s own bottomless grief.
“What the—?”
Something, something she had long thought deadened by endless rounds of acrid, experimental potions, something downed like a powerline in a hurricane and yet still as incongruously, deceptively electrical, stirred in her chest. Tally trembled with the force of a sudden, blinding hope, the first emotion other than grief and guilt that she’d allowed herself to feel since—
“You got the tortured eyes right, Red, but Sarah didn’t mope.”
Nicte’s voice caused Tally to flinch so violently that she nearly toppled forward into the stream.