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[one]
Ava is gone, and Beatrice is alone.
The world turns, crises of faith and accusations of blame crossing borders and religions, people already theorizing and explaining away the mass hysteria and violence that had swept through humanity like a typhoon, and Beatrice sits in the wreckage, an empty space at her side, and decides to leave.
She waits, alone in a bloody and battered basement in front of a portal that had gone quiet and cold after taking Ava away from her. Jillian had told them-- Miguel had shown them-- that people returned, sometimes. Lilith came back twice, spat out changed after days the first time and smoking after seconds the next, Michael sent back with care two months later, and faith has always been Beatrice’s business, so she waits. She sits surrounded by the carnage of Michael and Adriel, back to the arc because if she looks at it then surely her chest will collapse in on itself because the last she looked at the arc was when it saved Ava by taking her away, and stares dully at the bloodstains on the floor. Here was where Michael died; there was where Adriel was ripped apart.
There was where Ava collapsed after pulsing the halo towards the divinium filling Michael’s dead body, strong enough to pulverize his body, strong enough to catapult Ava back and shatter her ribs on the concrete floor, but not strong enough to destroy Adriel. There was where Beatrice had held her, where Beatrice had felt the way Ava’s ribcage shifted dangerously under her hands, blood in her teeth from the damage that a used-up halo couldn’t recharge fast enough to heal her from.
The smear of blood on the floor had come when Lillith had helped her lift Ava up, claws retracted and muscles barely flinching under the effort of lifting Ava’s broken body with her. There’s still blood on Beatrice’s boots, tracked across the floor. Ava’s blood, and all that’s left of her in this world.
Beatrice waits. Camila finds her first, with Yasmine, with Dora, with all the others, bursting into the room with guns drawn to find her sitting straight-backed and stoic on the steps in front of the arc. Camila was always the fastest of them all, and she’s the first to reach Beatrice, eyes a question and hands pulling back abruptly inches from her shoulders.
“Did--”
“It’s done,” Beatrice says, steady, sure. She doesn’t explain that Camila had always been right, that their best plans would never be enough, that loving a warrior nun was loving a life that could never be, that loving Ava was right in every way possible and that the halo was the only reason Beatrice found her and the one reason they never had a chance. She doesn’t explain that that enormous smear of blood and body parts is Michael, forever gone for real this time, but that the smaller one, the one her boots had tracked across the floor, was Ava dying, was Ava being saved by the arc, was Ava living in a world Beatrice could never touch.
Camila breaks like Ava had broken when they lost Mary, like Ava had broken when they lost Mother Superion, like Beatrice had broken when she watched Ava plummet thirteen stories onto concrete and die in front of her. Camila breaks because she can, because Ava is gone and they’ve all lost so much, and Beatrice watches her and for one brief, horrible moment hates her for it because Beatrice can’t break. Breaking will admit that Ava is gone, that Ava isn’t coming back, that Beatrice wasted so much time when they had so precious little to begin with, and faith has always been her business, so Beatrice stands up stoic and holds herself steady and wraps Camila up in her arms.
It’ll never be the same as holding Ava-- Ava with her stupid smiles, Ava with her bouncing cheerful energy, Ava with her unbearably bright light that had nothing to do with the power she carried and everything to do with a childhood spent alone and a second chance granted-- but she loves Camila, loves all of the sister warriors she has left, so she holds her up and waits.
Michael came back. Lilith came back. Faith has never come easy to Beatrice-- it always was a business, a honed skill, a shield against the empty lonely childhood and a grating aching adolescence shunted out of sight by her disappointed parents-- but she’s had faith in Ava since the minute they stood outside of a tomb in the Vatican catacombs and Beatrice realized that she brought the dynamite as a backup to Ava out of habit instead of actual worry. She’d always known Ava would do what they needed, would succeed and find her way through her own fear, and Ava hadn’t disappointed her.
Michael came back. Lilith came back. Ava hasn’t disappointed her yet, and she won’t start now.
Beatrice waits.
[two]
Beatrice has never wanted for money. Her parents made more than enough, and even when their cool disappointment after one too many times catching her staring longingly at the girls in gymnastics practice had her sent her off to boarding school and lonely years to try and fight her way back to their favor, she never wanted for financial security. There’s a seven-figure account in her name gathering dust and interest in Switzerland, one she’d thought of longingly more than once when she and Ava had doubled up on shifts at the bar to keep themselves in rent and food, but she can’t touch it now. Not without Ava. She considers the balance and thinks of a house in the Alps, somewhere new and quiet, on a lakeshore with space to run and enough stars to fill the whole sky, a bed bigger than they’d ever need and a fireplace and a kitchen where they could both pretend they know how to cook.
She leaves the account where it is, untouched still, and pointedly doesn’t think about it as she makes her way out of Spain, away from Italy and Switzerland and Portugal and every place she’s ever shared air with Ava. She goes to Greece first, and then to Turkey, and then keeps making her way east, taking odd jobs at bars and coffee shops along the way, and spends her nights staring at the ceiling of whatever boarding house or hostel she’s sleeping in and considering the home they could have when Ava gets back. The home they could’ve already had, if she’d had the courage to make Ava run and to run with her.
She doesn’t have a phone with her-- she’s never had one-- but she dutifully finds her way to libraries and internet cafes periodically, every week, to log into the encrypted email Camila had set up for her and let her and Mother Superion and Yasmine know that she’s still alive. It’s nearly five in the morning after a long shift at a cafe in Nepal where the owner had let her sleep on the cot in the storeroom in exchange for playing security guard throughout the night when she logs in on the owner’s computer and finds an email from Jillian.
Jillian hadn’t asked her to stay, not the way Camila or Mother Superion had. Jillian was the only one who hadn’t asked anything of her, who had let out a ragged scream, primal and quaking, when they came home without Michael and Ava. She had been silent when Beatrice decided to leave, had squeezed her shoulder and watched her go, and now has sent her the details to a bank account.
Take time to live. It’s what she wanted for you, is all it says. There’s a second email with the password, and Beatrice stares at the hefty sum waiting for her-- more than enough to wander the world until Ava comes back and still buy three houses if that’s what they wanted-- and, for the first time since she left, considers calling home.
She can’t. Not yet, not now. Home is waiting for her, the OCS and the life she’d built for herself, but she can’t go home without Ava. She left the reconstruction of the world and the order and home behind, left because Ava wanted her to live, because Ava will come home one day and Beatrice will be able to tell her that she lived a full life in the time she was gone and missed her for every second of it.
Beatrice stares at the email from Jillian for long minutes, as the sky outside starts to lighten and the owners show up for the day and start to open the store. Beatrice has enough cash stashed to feed her for another week and still cover a train ticket-- she’d been making her way halfheartedly east with the vague destination of New Zealand in mind, holding onto some faded corner of happy childhood memories when her father spoke of visiting his grandparents there-- and she leaves nearly all of it in an envelope on the neatly-made bed in the storeroom and slips out the back, duffel hoisted over one shoulder.
She can’t go home yet. Not yet, not now, not until Ava is home too. It’s an hour-long walk to the train station, and she uses the last of her cash to finally buy a smartphone and calls the bank for the walk. She’s spent weeks hitchhiking and scraping by, and she doesn’t mind it. Asceticism always came more naturally to her than faith, but Ava had spent an entire weekend in Switzerland talking in a dreamy distant way about one day-- after Adriel, after the world surviving, after when they would have time and space to live-- planning trips specifically designed to get Beatrice to loosen up, when they would buy first-class plane tickets to new cities where they wouldn’t have to hide for their lives and eat at extraordinary restaurants and stay in hotels with sunset views and private pools.
Asceticism has always come easier to her than faith, but Ava will come home and Beatrice has living to do and the means to do it however she wants, now. By the time she makes it to the train station she’s managed to set up a train ticket and then a car service and then a plane ticket, first class to Hong Kong. Ava had always wanted to go to Singapore, so Beatrice goes to Hong Kong instead. Singapore can wait until Ava is home with her.
[three]
After Hong Kong, she goes to Tokyo, then Hawaii, then San Francisco. In every city she stays in a luxurious hotel and still finds herself unable to sleep properly, the cloud-like beds too soft and spacious compared to the single ratty bed and even rattier futon at their apartment in the Alps, where they’d rock-paper-scissored every night to see who won the honor of taking the futon and letting the other have the slightly better night’s sleep. Ava would light up like the sun every time she won, crowing with delight and dancing victoriously around Beatrice before triumphantly diving onto the futon.
With the money from Jillian earning interest faster than she can spend it, there’s no need to work, so she fills her days with wandering new cities, touring every museum and historical site she can find and taking note of places she needs to bring Ava back to. Science museums and preserved libraries win out most often, and she finds herself snapping pictures on the phone she’d bought herself-- a new one, now, better than what she’d bought in Nepal, expensive enough that the camera is better than the DSLR her mother had bought her once in grade four in a desperate attempt to find her a hobby more befitting a girl of her stature than aikido and boxing-- everywhere she goes.
She writes home more frequently now, and Camila writes back immediately every time, chatty and lengthy letters full of gossip about the new recruits-- Yasmine is hopeless with a firearm but shockingly good with a baton, and Dora has made it her mission to win a best of three spar with Mother Superion-- while carefully never asking when Beatrice is coming home.
San Francisco entertains her for a week before she buys a car and drives down the coast to Los Angeles. The smog and smudge of the city makes her hate it immediately, but she books a room in Malibu for the weekend and watches the sun sink into the Pacific Ocean from a restaurant in Venice and wonders if Ava would like it here. There’s both glitz and grime to the city, something that reminds her of Ava, bright in spite of the darkest moments, grit underwriting a gleaming white smile.
The stars aren’t visible here, washed away by the bright lights of the city, somehow even more so than in Tokyo or Hong Kong or San Francisco. She walks north along the water until long after the sun has set, staring at the water of an ocean Ava hasn’t seen yet, and settles into the sand, ignoring the way it’ll be everywhere in her clothes when she gets back to the hotel.
The steady stream of people walking along the water dies down, and it quiets around her, footsteps and voices and car horns tapering off over the course of the night until the ocean is all she can hear.
“You okay?”
The voice snaps her out of her trance-like stare at the ocean. She’d heard footsteps behind her-- one set, light enough to likely be a woman, unmeasured and careful enough in the sand to likely not be a threat-- but it’s the sound of somoene speaking to her that startles her more than the presence of another person.
“I’m sorry?” She twists to look over her shoulder, and finds a woman watching her questioningly.
“Are you okay?” The woman reminds her of the one at the bar in Switzerland, the one who’d told her that Ava wasn’t her only friend in the world, and Beatrice turns back to the ocean, clears her throat, shakes her head. “It’s just that you were sitting here when I left for my run, and you’re still here now.”
“I’m alright, thank you,” Beatrice says.
"Are you sure?" The woman winces and laughs nervously, shakes her head. "Sorry, I just--this isn't the most common spot for people to sit down alone for hours."
Beatrice considers the question for a long moment, considers what would happen if she poured herself and her loss and her fury out onto the sand for a stranger to see.
"I'm okay," she says instead. "But thank you. It's kind of you to ask."
"Ah, well." The woman scuffs the heel of her running shoe in the sand, fiddles with the earbuds in her hands. "I figure I would appreciate someone checking if I were sitting out here alone, so why not check on you, you know?"
Beatrice smiles in spite of her mood, because she understands it more than she wants to admit. To be noticed, to be seen for something besides a weapon, a soldier, an overachieving warrior sister bending the curve higher, is something she hadn't known she was missing until the halo lit up out of Ava's back and disrupted a shotgun blast aimed straight for Beatrice.
"I do," she says softly. "I completely understand."
“Do you want to get a drink?”
Beatrice blinks at her, startled out of her constant prodding at the wound that is her loss once more. “Pardon?”
She shrugs, laughs nervously, gestures with one hand. “I mean-- thought I might as well shoot my shot, yeah? Pretty girl sitting all alone, I’d hate myself if I didn’t at least ask.”
“I don’t drink,” Beatrice blurts out, because she hasn’t had a drink since Switzerland, since the first and last time she’d tasted alcohol warm on her tongue and wondered how it would feel to skip rock paper scissors and drag Ava into the tiny terrible bed in the apartment with her.
“Coffee would work, too,” the woman says. She’s pretty, almost strikingly so, the kind of girl who a younger Beatrice-- one who hadn’t locked herself into a convent for her parents’ sake, younger and more reckless and always a sucker for a pretty girl with a clever smile-- would have been tying herself in knots over. She laughs nervously again, clasps her hands behind her back.
Beatrice could go home with her. She’s a nun, but she wasn’t always, and she knows exactly what sort of good trouble she could find herself in with this pretty girl with the clever smile. The same kind of good trouble she’d spent too much time imagining having with Ava, too much time imagining and no time doing until suddenly they were out of time.
“I’m flattered,” Beatrice says eventually. “But I’m sorry. I’m--taken.”
“Oh,” the woman says, glancing down at her shoes and letting out a sigh. “Lucky guy. Or girl.”
“Girl,” Beatrice says, and she smiles, unexpectedly. “Ava.”
“Lucky Ava,” the woman corrects. She smiles and sighs again. “Worth a shot, I thought. Figured if you were sitting out here this long alone then maybe-- well. You know.”
“I’m flattered,” Beatrice says again, because she is. She’s not blind to how people look at her-- she never attracted stares like Lilith did, tall and imposing and striking; or Camila, with her dark hair and dark eyes and quick kind smiles lighting up everyone around her; but enough people have tried their luck in spite of the nun’s habit for her to notice-- but it’s never not been flattering.
Plenty of people had hit on Ava in Switzerland, the pretty girl with the easy smile pouring them drinks an irresistible opportunity to plenty of people who’d passed through the bar. Ava had never seemed interested in any of them, instead of letting them flirt and tip heavy and then flopping down next to Beatrice with the extra tips and announcing which terribly absurd snack food from the local grocery store she was going to buy with it. She’d only ever looked at Beatrice with interest, and Beatrice, drowning in her own interest, had squandered it until there was no time left.
“She should be careful, or someone might steal you away,” the woman says, and Beatrice smiles down at her knees. Her jeans are covered in sand, and she brushes at them absently.
“She’s--traveling,” Beatrice says after a moment. “But I’ll be sure to tell her when she gets home.”
“Lucky Ava,” the woman says again. She flashes a smile and waves, pops her headphones back into her ears. Beatrice waves and watches as she returns to the path and sets off at an easy jog. She runs like someone who runs for fitness, her form good but not perfect.
“She’s traveling,” Beatrice murmurs back out towards the ocean. “She’ll be home soon.”
[four]
Lilith finds her in Uruguay, still adjusting to the winter weather after flying straight down a summery Chicago. She’s foregone a hotel in favor of renting a villa outside Montevideo, one that comes with a vineyard and a sparring gym and private security. She’s paid for two months in advance and intends to hole up in one place for longer than a few weeks for the first time since she left, to sleep, to enjoy the quiet and read and train and continue avoiding the world.
She’s been there for two days when a familiar sound, one that wakes her in her dreams every night, Lilith’s teleporting hum dangerously close to the sound of the arc powering down, draws her attention away from the tea she’s brewing in the oversized kitchen.
She doesn’t say anything, hands folding easy on the counter while remembering immediately where every kitchen knife is, where each gun she’d stashed throughout the house is, and raises her eyebrows, and waits. Lilith’s body is less human than ever, metallic scaling covering almost every visible inch of skin, but there’s a distinctly human tilt to her frown, one that sends Beatrice hurtling back to the Vatican catacombs and Lilith, full of fear and an overwhelmingly human need to help, wrapped shaking in Mary’s arms.
Beatrice waits. Lilith has never been as patient as her, and she speaks first.
“This house reminds me of my parents.”
Beatrice tilts her head, still waiting. The kettle whistles, and she busies herself with pouring the water into the pot and setting the tea to steep, retrieving an extra teacup from the cabinet. Lilith watches her, fidgeting, fingernails growing and retracting rhythmically with the clench and release of her fists. The light glints off of the scales covering her arms.
“You’re not going to ask how I found you?” Lilith is uncomfortable, so obvious that it’s almost comical, and Beatrice considers answering. Considers if there’s any point in explaining that she couldn’t care less how Lilith found her, that she’s made her peace with the fact that someone she’d once considered a friend helped nearly kill Ava and could kill her in an instant if she wanted to take Beatrice by surprise, that the only reason she hadn’t yanked the gun nearest up from it’s spot taped under the countertop to shoot her dead is that Lilith was the one who helped save Ava by sending her away.
Instead, she sets teapot and cups on a tray and circles the kitchen island, brushes past Lilith and settles at the dining table that has room for eight people.
Lilith stands fidgeting for long seconds before finally breaking, huffing out a sigh and half-stomping over to take a seat with an extra chair of space between them. Beatrice watches her, watches for the familiar tension of intentionality to snap through her spine-- Lilith of all of them except Camila had been the worst at hiding her intentions in a fight, even if she was the best of them besides Beatrice herself at winning them-- that should put her guard up, and folds her hands in her lap.
“You look tired,” Lilith says finally.
“Jetlag,” Beatrice says after a beat, as if she’d actually changed timezones by more than a few hours.
“You wouldn’t have to be jetlagged it you went back to the order.” Lilith’s hand flexes over the table, pulling back at the last second before her claws destroy that wood, and retracts, settles her hands on the tabletop absently.
“The order is fine.” Beatrice busies herself with pouring tea. It hasn’t steeped long enough and comes out weak and translucent, but it keeps her steady to have something to do.
“They miss you.”
“You tried to kill us all, so I’m not sure why you care,” Beatrice says before she can stop herself. An apology-- unearned, unnecessary-- rises in her throat, but Lilith doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away.
“To be fair,” she says, insufferably posh. “I didn’t try to kill you all. Just--”
“Don’t,” Beatrice says over her. She nearly upends her teacup, and has to pull in a careful breath, delicately unpeel her fingers from the fragile porcelain in her hands before she breaks it. Ava’s ribcage, shattered to pieces, had felt so delicate under her hands as she held onto her, and it’s been months but her hands still remember the sharp edges that had pressed from under Ava’s skin.
Lilith has the decency to look apologetic, and doesn’t try to mask it ,even if apologies have never been part of her repertoire.
“I didn’t,” Lilith starts, and then pauses, inhales, closes her eyes. Her eyelids are as metallic as the rest of her. “I was wrong. I was lost after Mary and I made poor choices, and I let him take advantage of me.”
“Is that meant to be an apology?” Beatrice wants to throw the teacup at her, throw the entire pot at her, wants to flip the heavy dining room table over and rip an oak leg off and smash it into Lilith’s chest, wants to hit her until her chest collapses like Ava’s had. “Am I meant to forgive you for trying to-- for what you did to--”
“No,” Lilith says, unwavering. “I’m not here to ask your forgiveness. What you do or don’t forgive is up to you. But the order needs you, and you need them. There’s a holy--”
“A holy war coming, yes.” Beatrice barely recognizes her own voice, sardonic, cutting, cruel. “Yes, I remember. Are you here to tell me that I should be on the same side as you?”
“I’m not on anyone’s side.” Lilith’s hands flex and her claws extend, barely stopping before gouging into the table. “The order isn’t my home anymore, Beatrice, it hasn’t been since I came back wrong.”
“We were always your home,” Beatrice throws back. “We cared for you after-- we were there for you--”
“I was an abomination.” Lilith’s eyes flash, inhuman for a brief moment before settling back to a familiar furious brown. “The only person who didn’t treat me like I was different was Mary and--”
She cuts off and a long-dormant impulse, the one that has always prompted Beatrice to help, flares in her chest. Lilith is hurting, has always been hurting, buckling under the pressure of familial expectation and living up to Shannon, cracking under her own fury when the halo was burned into Ava’s back. Lilith who followed them to the Vatican to help, who came home shattered under the loss of Mary and set herself on a self-inflicted suicide mission to find her and make Vincent and Adriel pay; Lilith who could have left after Adriel’s death but instead came back, flashing back into being and holding a respectful distance back while Beatrice cried over Ava’s dying body, found a solution that offered a sliver of possibility, helped lift and carry Ava so gently to the arc and stepped back to give Beatrice space to say goodbye in peace.
Beatrice breathes in carefully, straightens her teacup in its saucer to busy her hands. “Maybe we should have seen how much you were hurting,” she concedes. “It doesn’t excuse--”
“I know that,” Lilith says, snappish and angry, and, somehow, Beatrice smiles because Beatrice’s world was put on pause the minute she lost Ava but Lilith will always be Lilith, no matter how much interdimensional magic or science changes her body.
“It doesn’t excuse what you did,” Beatrice carries on as if she hadn’t heard Lilith, because few things annoy Lilith more than being spoken over. She may understand Lilith now in a way she hadn’t before-- there were always similarities between them, distant childhoods of wealthy parents heavy with disappointment leaving them both cracked in different places, loving with their whole hearts in spite of their best efforts-- but she can’t resist the ugly urge to needle, to prick, to land hits against her. “But I do understand it, to an extent. And you helped me-- her-- when--”
Her resolve shatters, the satisfaction at getting the upper hand over Lilith and the sudden realization that she’s ready to forgive Lilith this time both wiped away under a sudden wave of loss because Ava is gone and Beatrice is alone. A sob cracks in her chest, ripping its way up through her throat and bursting out, ugly and creaking. The teacup she’d so carefully stopped herself from breaking shatters when her elbow sends it skittering across the table when she can’t stop herself from collapsing forward and curling around the viscerally present pain in her chest.
It’s been three months, and she hasn’t cried once. She hasn’t shed a tear, in public or in private, since she said I love you to Ava’s disappearing, dying body. She waited for hours by the arc, until Mother Superion pulled her away, and was quiet and stoic; she waited for days, while the order treated their wounds and hid from public view while the world worked its way through the wreckage, and was quiet and calm, going through the motions of training and organizing and cleaning, anything to keep her hands busy and her head quiet. She hasn’t cried since she let Ava go, since Lilith helped and watched and waited, but Lilith is here now and Ava isn’t it and Beatrice is so alone it makes her want to scream but all she can manage to do is let out three months of pent-up grief.
A hand settles gently at her back, another on the top of her head, and she should move, should throw Lilith back, because Lilith is dangerous and her hands are mortal weapons, but Ava is gone and they were never going to have enough time because there isn’t enough time in the universe but they could have had more and Beatrice is left here alone with nothing but a clawing aching hole in her chest and an empty bed and empty life that she never even got a chance to share with Ava and now Lilith, unkillable where Ava was always so painfully mortal.
“Stop,” she manages to say, voice thick and choking and unrecognizable. She can’t even manage to straighten her own spine, to sit up and glare, but she makes a halfhearted attempt at knocking Lilith away; it predictably does less than nothing, Lilith a solid unmovable wall with supernatural powers crouched at her side. “Stop it.”
“You have to deal with this.” Lilith’s voice is distant and tinny, even as her hands stay steady and painfully present. “You have to, so you can move forward.”
The next sob that had been building up to break in Beatrice’s chest disappears, her skin going cold under Lilith’s touch, and Beatrice sits up so abruptly that it’s surely only Lilith’s powers that keep her from falling back.
“What did you say?”
“What?” Lilith should be unrecognizable, her skin metallic and her balance so preternaturally steady she looks like a statue defying the laws of gravity, but the tilt to her mouth is the exact same one she would get when Beatrice beat her in a spar, frustrated and entitled and confused.
Beatrice sits up straighter, wipes at her eyes methodically. “What did you say to me?”
“You need to deal with how you feel,” Lilith says slowly. She’s still crouching by Beatrice’s chair. It’s not often that Beatrice can physically look down at Lilith, and it’s intoxicating, the illusion of high ground. “Grief won’t fade if you don’t let yourself--”
“I’m not grieving,” Beatrice spits out. She doesn’t realize she’s standing until Lilith jerks back to her feet. “I’m waiting.”
“Waiting,” Lilith says slowly, even as her eyes flicker and her shoulders slope downwards. “For what, Beatrice?”
“For Ava,” Beatrice says, sure and steady. Steady because she has to be, sure because anything else is a betrayal. Faith is her business and the world is in turmoil, the church and the faith crumbling in real time as Beatrice ignores every frantic end-times preacher on street corners in every city she passes through, but Beatrice traded her faith in God to faith in Ava long before Reya spoke the tarasks away. “You came back from there. Michael came back. So will she.”
Lilith softens visibly, unfamiliar and terrifying, and Beatrice wants to clock her in the jaw and considers doing it, the bones in her hand be damned.
“Beatrice,” Lilith says softly. “She’s gone.”
“She’ll be back,” Beatrice says. She turns crisply and sets to gathering the pieces of broken porcelain on the table. “When she does, I’ll come home.”
“She’s gone,” Lilith says again. A hand comes up and settles gently on Beatrice’s shoulder, and Beatrice freezes in place. “Even if she can find a way back, time moves-- different. You saw how long it was for Michael--”
Beatrice snaps a piece of porcelain in her hand and slams her fists onto the table so hard it shudders, the lid of the teapot rattling and Lilith’s teacup falling over. Lilith’s hand doesn’t move on her shoulder, and better judgment loses out and Beatrice pivots and slams a fist into the metallic line of Lilith’s jaw.
Lilith doesn’t flinch. Beatrice throws another punch, and another, driving Lilith back step by step, until Beatrice’s knuckles are bleeding and even Lilith’s supernaturally-protected skin has started to bleed. She doesn’t deflect or dodge, doesn’t fight back, doesn’t do anything but let Beatrice let out months of fury and loss-- Shannon and Mary and even Michael, who she never liked; the order, the church, the foundations she’d built her life on; Ava, infuriating and extraordinary and dying in Beatrice’s arms-- on her face until the early morning sunlight had lifted higher in the sky and Beatrice’s body, honed for combat since she was a child, finally gives out.
Beatrice throws a final weak punch, bloody knuckles skidding pathetically along the slick smear of blood on Lilith’s jaw, and her legs give out, twisting under her, and Lilith catches her as she falls. They’re in the living room now, somehow, and she lowers Beatrice to sitting on the couch with a care that Beatrice never would’ve expected from her.
“She’ll be back,” Beatrice says, chest aching as she struggles to pull enough air into her lungs, and she wraps her arms around herself, as if she can hold her aching cracking pieces together if she tries hard enough.
“Ava is gone,” Lilith says steadily. “But you aren’t. You’re still here, and so is the order and everyone there.”
“Why do you even care?” Beatrice blinks tiredly at her. “You left us.”
“I was wrong,” Lilith says, firm, easy, so sure that it almost steadies Beatrice. “I don’t expect anyone to want me to come home, and I won’t ask. But like it or not, this peace after Adriel won’t last forever, and when this war comes--”
“You hope we’ll be on the same side,” Beatrice parrots with a sigh. She uncurls her hold on herself and inspects her knuckles. She’s fairly certain she has a boxer’s fracture, the bone cracking on the unbreakable strength of Lilith’s jaw.
“I don’t care what side anyone is on,” Lilith says with a sniff. “Not anymore. But whatever side the order is on? I’ll fight for you. You, and Camila, and Mother Superion. I’ll be there.”
Beatrice stares at her, at her familiar features and unfamiliar skin, bloody and shining, a rival who had sometimes been a friend, a friend who had tried to kill the person Beatrice loved most in the world, an enemy who helped save Ava’s life.
“Why are you here, Lilith?” She’s tired. She’s so tired, and still wants tea, and to be alone with her grief-- not grief over Ava’s death, because Ava will come home, but grief over lost time, over wasted opportunities, over every stupid moment she thought about kissing Ava and learning with precision exactly what the appealing line of her neck felt like under her lips and did nothing about it-- and exhaustion and loneliness.
“You need to go home,” Lilith says after a long silence. “For them, and for you. Don’t make my mistakes, Beatrice. Don’t cut yourself off from them because you’re hurting.”
She stands up, leaving a smudge of blood on the couch from the splatters on her clothes, and rolls her shoulders, cracks her neck, dabs at her bruised jaw.
“You always could hit harder than anyone else in the order,” she says conversationally. She waits expectantly for a response, but all Beatrice can do is stare tiredly at her, and Lilith sighs. “Go home, Beatrice.”
She steps back, and then again, until she’s in more space and her wings unfurl. She sighs and rolls her shoulders again, and Beatrice frowns disdainfully at the display.
“They start to hurt, the longer I have them pulled in,” Lilith says by way of explanation. “Don’t worry, I won’t fly out of here and ruin any more of your security deposit.” She glances around the spacious house, the pool and hot tub on the deck outside, the glass door to the wine cellar. “Not that you can’t afford it, presumably.”
“I haven’t forgiven you,” Beatrice says abruptly, and Lilith pauses in the middle of stretching her wings.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“She would,’ Beatrice says, because it’s true. Ava and her infuriating reckless joy at living, Ava and her impossible capacity for forgiveness, would sit in Beatrice’s place and forgive Lilith. “She will. But I don’t know that I ever will.”
“It’s always easier, I think,” Lilith says slowly. “To forgive for yourself than for someone you love.” She tilts her head to one side, weak winter sunlight glinting off her cheekbone. “I can see myself forgiving Vincent for manipulating me, one day. But I’ll never forgive him for Mary.”
It’s as close to an acknowledgement that Lilith has offered, to speaking to the fact that she watched Ava say I love you and Beatrice be too slow to offer it back before Ava was lost into the portal that would save her life. Beatrice stares dully at her, unwilling to offer any reaction, unready to forgive, unable to forget.
“Go home, Beatrice,” Lilith says again. “You’re no good to anyone like this, and you’re waiting for something that may never come. There are people still here who need you.”
She vanishes, the heavy wooden coaster Beatrice had picked up and flung at her sailing harmlessly through the glowing wake of her teleportation. Lilith always had been faster than Beatrice liked to admit, and she watches the coaster crash onto the tiles and skid across the floor.
“She’s wrong,” she says into the quiet of the room. “She’s wrong. Ava will come home. “She will.”
The house is quiet around her.
[one]
The email comes in early one morning when she’s in Cairo, sprawled half-asleep across the bed in a villa she’d rented on a whim, sunlight just starting to break over the horizon when her phone buzzes innocently. She’s gotten used to having a phone now, has gotten used to the theory of being reachable even if no one has yet taken advantage of it, leaving her to her quiet pilgrimage across the world without Ava.
She considers rolling over and going back to sleep, but aside from her bank and travel accommodations the only time her phone goes off is when Camila emails her, and she doesn’t have any travel coming up soon. Her shoulders ache when she reaches for the phone, a sunburn from a careless afternoon spent in the sun after arriving yesterday leaving her with a fading sunburn.
The email is from Jillian, and that’s enough to banish her thoughts of sleep and sunburn alike, sitting up properly to read it.
They’ll never ask it of you, but please come back. Things are changing, and the order needs you.
There’s nothing else, no clarification, no details, nothing but a request from Jillian, Jillian who’s never asked anything of Beatrice, Jillian who lost a son for a second time just as Beatrice lost Ava. Beatrice reads the two line email another four times before dropping back across the mattress, phone on her chest as she watches the shadows shorten across the canopy of the bed.
She should go home. No one has asked anything of her since they lost Ava. They all stayed, holding together the order and the mission, preparing for whatever comes next, while Beatrice walked away from responsibility for the first time in her life because she couldn’t bear to wait for Ava in any of the places they’d ever shared.
There’s a war coming, if Lilith is to be believed. Lilith has always been many things, is so much more now, but dishonest has never been one of them. Beatrice has known, every time she boarded a plane or train, taking herself further from the places she’d known with the order and with Ava, that she was taking herself further from a fight she wouldn’t be able to avoid forever.
They’ll never ask it of you, but please come back. Things are changing, and the order needs you.
She reads the email again and breathes in deep and measured, exhales slower, and books herself a flight to Madrid.
The airport is familiar when she lands, the path to customs winding through duty free, and she walks slowly. She’s going home, but she’s not ready to face it again, and her pace drags, and she finds herself wandering through duty free inspecting bottles of champagne and boxes of chocolates, cartons of cigarettes and bottles of perfume.
There’s a shelf full of novelty liquors, cheap and atrocious even to her untrained eye. Ava would love every single one of them, would pour shots and drag Beatrice into trying them all, smile wide and unrestrained and hands easy on Beatrice’s arm, full of more joy and laughter than anyone who’d lived her life had any right to have.
Beatrice picks up a bottle of lemon liqueur and considers a lemon drop, sweet and dangerous, shot glass in hand and Ava pressed against her side at the crowded bar, delighted and cracking puns and pounding on the bar every time Beatrice smiled. She carries the bottle up to checkout, digging for her boarding pass to pay as she waits in line.
It’s been eight months. Eight months without Ava, eight months since Ava disappeared through a portal to a world where a lifetime passed in two months for Michael. Beatrice has done the math, has done the math more times than she can count. The numbers are astronomical, the conversions more painful to consider with every day that clicks past. Too many lifetimes for even Ava, miraculous Ava, to live and survive and come home from.
Eight months is more time than Beatrice wants to count on the other side of the arc. Eight months is centuries on the other side of the arc. It had only been half that time when Lilith came to find her in Uruguay, when she told Beatrice to sit in her grief and live it, to move forward from it.
The bottle of liqueur slips out of her hands, crashing down onto the floor in the duty free checkout line. The only saving grace is that it’s so cheap the bottle is plastic instead of glass, clunking instead of shattering on the floor by her feet, but the noise sets every set of eyes within a ten meter radius on her.
It buzzes in her head, the sudden dizzying clarity she’d been trying to outrun for eight months, and she flinches back when some kind stranger in the line behind her asks if she’s okay, brushes past them and the people behind them and everyone until she can hurry out of duty free. Her duffel bumps into at least four different people on the way to a bathroom, and she thinks she apologizes but she can’t be sure because the entire world has shrunk down to eight months and a parallel four centuries on the other side of the arc.
She locks herself in a bathroom stall, barely managing to get the door locked behind her before crumpling silently around her knees, crammed into a corner by the door with her suitcase crushed between her shins and the opposite wall, forehead buried into her knees as she finally shatters under the realization that Ava isn’t coming back, that Ava can’t come back, that Ava will have lived out the rest of her life on the other side of the arc while Beatrice spent hers wasting time traipsing around the world alone.
They’ll never ask it of you, but please come back. Things are changing, and the order needs you.
The email from Jillian burns a hole in her jacket pocket, the weight of caring-- for Camila, for Mother Superion, for all that’s left of the family she’d once had and the responsibility she’d believed so wholeheartedly in-- rooting her in place curled around her own knees in an airport bathroom. Ava is gone, just like Mary is gone, just like Shannon is gone, but Beatrice is still here and her order needs her.
Faith is a business, and she closes it down and pulls herself to her feet. Ava is gone and Beatrice’s stubborn refusal to accept it has kept her from her home for too long. She wipes at her eyes and squares her shoulders, reels in one deep breath and then another, flexes her hands into fists and relaxes them, rolls her shoulders and sets her feet and settles into a familiar posture. Faith is her business and she’s held onto it for too long, sinking more and more into it when the reality that Ava is gone was always there, waiting for her to accept it. She’d let Ava go, all those months ago, let her go to save her life, and the hope that she’d ever come home had been ambitious and childish in a universe that had shown her, over and over, how little it cared for her hopes.
The order needs her, for whatever is coming. Her family needs her, like she’s always needed them for the last eight months, even if she couldn’t even understand it herself, how much she needed Camila’s embrace, Mother Superion’s calm, the purpose she’d gotten from the order long before her entire life chicaned into a purpose of stay with Ava.
She wipes at her eyes once more and sets her shoulders, gathers her suitcase. There’s a car waiting for her outside, ready to take her home, and she sits silently in the backseat and stares at a familiar city still showing scars of Adriel-- graffiti that hadn’t been painted over, people on street corners preaching about loss and belief, shuttered church parishes-- as she draws closer and closer to home.
The courtyard is empty, the recruits presumably out on training exercises. A flash of black in one of the upper windows gives away Mother Superion’s location, but Beatrice stands unnoticed on the flagstones and breathes in shakily, wishes for the calm that used to settle her when she stood in a home of the order. Purpose and belief had steadied her for so long, until Shannon was killed and Ava tumbled into their lives, a messy beautiful disaster that Beatrice never stood a chance against.
Something almost like an explosion-- a pulse, even-- inside rocks the courtyard, and Beatrice’s body reacts before her mind does, dumping her bag and filling her hands with the knives in her sleeves as she sprints towards the sound. The convent is empty and she speeds past the hallways full of weapons on display and paintings and statues, towards the sound of uncertain voices. She slams to a halt in the open doorway to a new lab area, shining and white and out of place within the stone walls of the convent, where Jillian and Mother Superion and Camila and Dora are all standing, shellshocked.
And there, in front of the familiar blue hum of the portal that took Ava away from her, is a crumpled heap of metallic limbs and black leather and blacker wings. Her skin is smoking and sizzling, a gash in one arm visibly knitting itself back together.
Beatrice stares, knives curled into her palms and eyes wide, watching with an ache in her chest as Lilith’s wings unfurl and reveal a smaller figure, the black leather of her jacket doing nothing to hide the glow of the halo embedded in her back, and Beatrice drops her knives and jerks back.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. A hand comes up over her mouth, shaking and uncertain, and she takes another step back. Jillian sees her first, gaze jerking from Beatrice to Lilith to what can’t possibly be Ava-- because Beatrice has been without her for eight months, because Ava has been gone for four centuries-- and back again, and then Camila’s follows, and then Dora’s, and then Mother Superion. “No.”
There’s a soft groan from the floor, Lilith’s wings pulling back further and Beatrice knows that profile, knows the curve of her jaw and the line of her nose, has mapped it in the dark every night for eight months alone. Beatrice knows that sound, the one that Ava makes when she’s waking up, had heard it every day for months in Switzerland, soft grumbling noises warming the air around her.
She rolls away from Lilith, sprawls on her back on the floor, chest heaving as she sucks in a breath and then another one. The sound of her breathing-- heavy and gasping but strong, nothing like Ava dying in her arms, Ava falling away into the arc-- unlocks every strand of muscles in Beatrice’s legs, and she barely manages to catch herself against the doorway to stay upright as Ava breathes in front of her, brought home by Lilith.
“I could hear her,” Lilith says, panting, crouched with her elbows on her knees and her wings smoking. “From the other side, through the arc. I didn’t know--I wasn’t--”
“We kept it powered,” Jillian says weakly. “Just in case she-- just to be sure.” She looks back to Beatrice, just like Camila is looking to Beatrice, and Mother Superion, and Dora and Lilith and everyone except Ava, as if no one can touch Ava without asking Beatrice first.
“I could hear her,” Lilith says again. “I don’t know why. But when Jillian power it up again, I could go through and-- she was right there.”
“She can hear you,” Ava says with a groan, dropping an arm over her eyes and flipping a middle finger at Lilith. “Still mad at you, for the record.”
“I can live with that,” Lilith says wryly, speaking to Ava but looking dead straight at Beatrice.
“How,” Camila starts, and then stops, and then starts again. “I thought time was-- I thought it would have been--”
“Reya can do whatever she wants with time,” Ava says. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. “I don’t know how long it’s-- it was two years, there. I think.”
She drops her hands from her eyes, pushes up to her elbows with a groan, and a noise that Beatrice never thought herself possible of making escapes out of her compressed throat because Ava is here, Ava is home, Ava who Beatrice had given up on is home and staring at her with that infuriating charming smile and her heart on her sleeve, and Beatrice is going to pass out if she can’t figure out how to breathe soon.
“Bea,” Ava says softly, reverently, and it snaps the tether holding Beatrice in place. She doesn’t realize her feet are moving until she’s crashing into Ava when she’s halfway to standing, sending the both of them tumbling to the floor. The leather of Ava’s jacket creaks achingly under the hold Beatrice has on her, creaking like her armor had when Beatrice held her after she fell, like it had when Beatrice held her as she was dying, and Beatrice crushes her face into the side of Ava’s neck in breathes in as deep as she can because if this isn’t going to last, if she’s always going to be on borrowed time, then she wants to make the most of it.
The last time she held Ava, it was to let her go, it was when Ava was dying, it was when Ava had kissed her and left her behind and Beatrice had followed and still lost her anyways.
“Please be real,” Beatrice says into the side of her neck, gasping and aching, the world cracking under her feet because if she loses Ava again she won’t be able to walk back from it. “Please be real.”
Familiar hands, smaller than hers, calloused like hers, powerful and reckless and gentle, slide up her spine, along her shoulders and her neck until she’s being pulled back by palms against her cheeks and fingers in her hair. Ava’s eyes are shining, her hands gentle on Beatrice’s skin, and Beatrice wants to crush herself into Ava’s chest, wants to wrap around her until no one could ever pull her away, wants to yell and cry and scream because Ava left her behind and it killed her and she has the audacity to come back right when Beatrice had given up on her.
“Beatrice,” Ava says, tilting her forehead into Beatrice’s and breathing out shakily. “I have so much to tell you about-- Reya, and the halo, and there’s-- there’s so much, Bea.”
“I don’t care at all,” Beatrice says, thick and aching. She presses her hands to Ava’s cheeks, drags a thumb over a cheekbone, traces over the ridge of an eyebrow, familiarizes her with the feel of a face she’s had memorized for months. “Not yet. I can’t.”
“I missed you.” Ava’s voice breaks on the words and Beatrice can’t open her eyes, not yet, but she turns into Ava’s hold and presses a kiss to the inside of her wrist, feel the flutter of a strong pulse under her lips. “The whole time, I-- I never stopped missing you.”
There’s the distant sound of disappearing footsteps, a door closing, but Beatrice can’t bring herself to focus on anything but the strength of Ava’s heartbeat against her lips, the wash of Ava’s breath on her cheek.
“I’m sorry it took me so long,” Ava says, nose nuzzling against Beatrice’s temple, lips following, and a dry sob cracks out of Beatrice’s chest. “There was so much I had to learn, it took me so long to-- to--”
“Ava,” Beatrice says into her pulse, dragging herself back enough to look at her head on. Ava, back home. Ava, here with her. Ava, alive and breathing in her arms after dying in them so many months ago. “I love you.”
She never knew if Ava heard her, when she said it. Watching her dying body sliding away through a portal Beatrice could never follow her through, saying it as loud as she dared but still so quiet in a room where there had been so much violence. She’d never known, not really, if Ava knew: that Beatrice could never not follow her because Beatrice loved her the way Beatrice had only ever loved her mission and her faith; that Beatrice let her go because the idea of a universe with Ava living in it, even if she was always out of reach, was better than a universe without her in it; that Beatrice loved her in all of her charming, bratty, delightful glory, with or without the halo that kept her upright and breathing.
“I love you,” she gasps out again, her own pulse thundering under her skin because she’s imagined reuniting with Ava so many times, has daydreamed about a home on a lake in the mountains for them together, but here, now, with Ava home and Ava breathing and Ava smiling at her and holding onto her hands and brushing a kiss over her knuckles, she can’t do anything else but say it, again and again. “I love you.”
Ava squeezes her hands, kisses her scarred knuckles on one hand and then the other and then drops them both, surges forward until they’re both off balance and toppling to the floor, but Ava is kissing her and Beatrice doesn’t care all when her back hits the tile floor and her head follows. Ava is kissing her, heated and aching and desperate, angry and rushed and nothing like the one moment they’d had to share eight months ago. That had been soft, tentative, a goodbye and an apology and an I wish we had more time holding them both back, but this is not that. One of Ava’s hands catches herself on the floor, the other curling along Beatrice’s cheek, and Beatrice’s hands grab at Ava’s back below the halo, fingernails digging in and holding on until a gasping heaving breath bursts out of Ava’s mouth.
“I love you,” Ava says, breathing heavy and refusing to pull away, and Beatrice holds on tighter, pulls Ava down until their foreheads press together again.
Beatrice lets out a rasping, aching laugh, fingers mapping the line of Ava’s spine, the edges of the halo, the angles of her shoulderblades. Ava kisses her again, slower, easier, like they have something more than borrowed time on a third-chance life together. Beatrice holds on and holds them together, holds herself in place with the weight of Ava steadying her for the first time in months.
“I love you,” Beatrice says again. “I missed you so much.” Beatrice kisses her again, not ready to let go yet, not ready to let go ever again because there may be a war coming but, but she loves Ava and Ava loves her and everything else will be fine because Ava is back with her. Faith is a business, and imperfect and wavering as it may be, it’s still hers and it brought Ava home.
“In this life,” Beatrice says, and Ava’s eyes spark and shine, lips pressing against one of Beatrice’s cheeks, thumb brushing along the other.
“In this life.”