Chapter Text
Lup is pretty sure she’s awake now.
It’s hard to say for certain. She’s steadily alert now, and that’s a good sign. Before, she’d only ever regained consciousness for short bursts of time, never even long enough to process where she is.
She remembers now that she was… absorbed by her Umbra Staff. It’s an unpleasant, frightening memory, but it’s clear as day.
It’s embarrassing, really, that she’s trapped in a prison of her own making. She’s thankful she’s not dead dead– at least, she doesn’t think she’s dead dead– but she feels foolish for not thinking to install some sort of failsafe in case her body got killed and the staff gobbled up her arcane specter.
Lup pushes back that thought for now. Self-deprecation won’t help her get out of this umbrella.
Neither will the fact that she can’t see shit. It’s not a feeling she’s used to; in both her body and her lich form, she could always see well in the dark. She sits up and lifts a hand to her face. She concentrates hard on the space in front of her, but nothing changes. She tries to groan, but either nothing comes out, or she’s lost her hearing, too.
Panic sets in. Lup’s form wavers in response, and for a moment, she can think only of how much easier it would be to let herself dissipate. There’s no telling if she’ll ever get her senses back, and she’s so godsdamn tired.
But she can’t go out like this. There are people out there in the world that she loves, people who she promised she’d return to soon. She thinks of her crew, her little makeshift family, recalls their voices and their laughter and their smiles, and she calms.
She thinks of her love, her Barry, and the warm, happy feeling she gets ensures her that she hasn’t lost herself yet. She remembers the feeling of being held by him, longs to be in his arms again, dreams of kissing him, and she stabilizes.
And Lup thinks of her brother.
She and Taako have never taken separation well. They’ve been through thick and thin together; every difficult thing she’s been through, she went through with him by her side. She needs him like a campfire needs kindling, and she’s sure he feels the same.
Lup misses him desperately. She realizes she has no idea how long she’s been gone, and he’s probably fucking pissed at her for running off without him. Guilt ripples through her form. She imagines how she’d feel if he disappeared, and she aches.
And so, with renewed determination, she vows to find a way out of this godsdamned umbrella.
Lup had never thought herself a particularly patient woman.
She’d been more than capable of waiting to get something she really wanted. Decades on the run taught her the value of the long con. Hell, she’d crushed on Barry for nearly half a century before making a move on him. Still, she much preferred instant gratification, generally speaking.
Suffice it to say, the wait for someone to find her sucked absolute shit.
Early on, she’d focused her time on regaining her senses. She’d done it through the most intense godsdamn concentration she’d ever managed. Her vision came first, though she almost didn’t realize– as it would turn out, the walls inside the Umbra Staff were made of a thick, velvety black material. She might have missed that there were walls at all, had she not noticed the folds in the material– it hung like a curtain, but with no opening, not even at the bottom.
Her hearing was soon to follow. She achieved this by making low humming noises and focusing really, really hard on trying to hear those. This gave her little new information to process.
The real kicker is that, after a great deal of time and effort, Lup was able to extend her senses outside the umbrella.
Her attempts to burn her way out had revealed that her magic was still significantly weakened by the Staff, so she’d begun meditating in hopes of revitalizing her power. After spending gods-know-how-long on that, she started hearing ambient noises in the cave– the squeaks of rats, the dripping of water from stalactites, the like.
It was jarring, at first, to transition from the silence inside the umbrella to the ambiance of the world, but she got accustomed pretty quickly. Once she’d gained the ability to hear outside the staff, she couldn’t turn it off. With focus, though, she could enhance her perception of sound outside.
The same focus eventually allowed her to see outside the umbrella, too, not that the view out there ever changed. It was leaps and bounds more exciting the first few times she looked than it was any subsequent time, but she was glad to have the ability.
On that note, being trapped in an umbrella in a derelict cave is godsdamn boring.
Even with her senses back, Lup spends most of her time continuing to meditate. It’s a shot in the dark, perhaps, but maybe continued meditation will provide her the key to escape the damned thing. At the very least, it’s something to do. But meditation requires a shitload of focus, and it gets fucking boring after a while, and she gets frustrated that hasn’t gained any rad new abilities in fuck-knows-how-long.
When Lup needs a break from meditation, she daydreams about the people she loves.
Her dreams almost always involve some sort of reunion scenario. Often, she dreams of walking back onto the Starblaster, into the arms of her waiting family. She imagines their reactions– Magnus sweeps her into the biggest hug she’s ever received, Merle pats her on the back, maybe says something about that dance she owes him. Davenport and Lucretia just fucking gape. Barry cries, and sweeps her into the grandest kiss she can imagine.
Taako yells at her, but she throws her arms around his neck, and he cries, too, and for a moment, everything feels okay.
(She tries not to think about the fact that her body is dead, and it would be impossible to hug any of them, unless Barry’s died too in the time since she left. She doesn’t wanna get bummed out.)
Sometimes, Lup’s dreams are consuming and vivid. She lets them sweep her away, lets herself believe for a moment that she’s free and reunited with her favorite people.
And so, when she hears the voices of those people echoing in the cave, she almost doesn’t believe they’re real.
“Uh, excuse me, whichever one you are, the dwarf, there’s a cane here to look at.”
Even after so much time in isolation, Taako’s voice is unmistakable to her. A rush of elation washes over her, and for a brief, giddy moment, she’s certain freedom is just around the corner.
Doubt was soon to follow, though, dousing her jubilance like a harsh wind on a candlewick. Having peeked out of the Umbra Staff countless times, she knew her body had completely skeletonized, rendering it difficult for a passerby to easily identify the remains as hers. Her IPRE robes, however, were somehow still perfectly intact, and it’s not as though those are freely given on this plane, at least not to her knowledge. She has a hard time believing Taako wouldn’t identify her immediately. Is someone playing some sort of cruel trick on her? Lup focuses her energy on looking outside the staff, and the faces she sees are indeed familiar to her.
Magnus stands farthest from her. He looks significantly older than Lup remembers, which is weird for her. She understands that humans live short lives and all, but it had been a century since Lup had seen anyone age.
If her judgement of human physical aging is accurate, she’s been gone about a decade. It freaks her out a bit to think of the way everyone’s life went out without her, so she tries not to think too hard about it.
Merle is knelt in front of her, looking exactly as she remembered him, and saying something about how he’s having a hard time concentrating.
And standing just behind Merle is Lup’s brother.
Like Merle, Taako hasn’t aged much since she saw him last, but he’d bleached his hair at some point, long enough ago that she can see dark roots peeking out from under the rim of his hat.
He seems to be pretty calm in this moment, for someone standing across from his sister’s corpse. Did he really not recognize her IPRE robes?
Lup focused back on Merle just in time to see that he’d removed said robes from her skeleton (um, rude, she thinks) and is now reaching towards her.
As his hand, covered by her robe, makes contact with the handle of the Umbra Staff, she feels his divine magic surround her, fill her little room, try to connect with her own arcane energy. “Wait, no…”
She doesn’t mean to hurt Merle, and she certainly doesn’t mean to send him flying backwards, but as she says the words, she overpowers Merle’s magic, ejecting it forcefully from the staff. She hears him groan from across the cave where he’s landed, and she feels guilty.
But if anyone besides her is going to handle the staff she made…
“Let me give it a whirl.” Taako picks Lup’s robe up from where Merle had dropped it and, just as the latter had done before him, reaches for the handle of the Umbra Staff.
Taako’s magic is familiar to Lup, and as it merges with her, she feels comforted, and more powerful than she has in the apparent decade she’s been trapped. She feels something like glee explode from her core, and she lets out a triumphant yell. Out in the cave, red lightning bolts erupt from the staff.
When the scene calms, she sees Taako turn the Umbra Staff over in his hands a few times, eyeing it curiously. “So now I have an umbrella.”
Lup begins rambling furiously. “Taako? Taako, can you hear me? It’s me, it’s Lup. I don’t know if you can hear me, but holy hell am I glad to see you. I know this is weird, but I’m trapped in the umbrella, long story, but if you could, like, work on figuring out some way to get me out of here– “
And her vision goes dark as Taako stuffs the Umbra Staff unceremoniously into his bag.