Work Text:
When they said repent, repent,
I wonder what they meant
- Leonard Cohen, "The Future"
Farah. Her greatest triumph, once; her greatest disappointment, later. She’s been like her, years ago, but unlike her protégée Rosalind had not broken when push came to shove. She understood war and its consequences far too well to allow herself to do so — knew what would happen if she broke, and so she’d forged the girl she’d been anew, remade herself in steel and magic and indomitable will. She knew what was coming, and with that she knew there was no other choice
It was a lonely existence, but that girl had lost all she’d held dear in the world to the enemy, and so the loneliness was familiar. If she were more sentimental, she might even call it comforting, but sentiment too has no place in her world. To stand solitary might be the price for what she knew was necessary, yet it was a price she paid willingly when she knew the alternative. Every conflict, after all, has had its martyrs. She has nothing to lose but her life, and that is nothing she is unwilling to give, so long as she takes them with her — so long as it prevents what she’d seen once, so long ago, from repeating.
(She doesn’t think about it now. The armour she’s wrapped herself in keeps her safe; if part of that safety means ensuring that she has nothing more to lose, then that too is a price she is willing to pay.)
As she looks around the office that had once been hers, it’s hard not to see, all too tangibly, the differences between them. Farah’s softness makes itself evident in warm colours and soft cushions and a teapot Rosalind takes a perverse delight in shattering against one wall. Even the drapes speak of an intimacy that has no place in her own life, and she shoves them open with a flick of her fingers to let harsh daylight flood the room. Alfea has gone soft as its headmistress, thinking the days of war are behind her, but Rosalind knows better. A greater war looms on the horizon, knocks at the gates, and she will see this school become what it had once been and its students become the soldiers they will need to be to ensure that the realms survive the days ahead. She will see Alfea endure, not for sentiment but for necessity.
Some will die. She knows that, has seen and lived that inevitable truth. (She can see, even now, broken and bloodied and burned bodies when she closes her eyes, but it has been a lifetime since they moved her.) But she is strong enough to know that at times such sacrifices are required for the greater good, and war is always that manner of a time.
(She can see Farah’s body, limp against the forest floor, and if she regrets that particular sacrifice had been needed then surely it is for what her pupil could have been. She had thought once they were kindred spirits, but it is too clear in hindsight that there had been an intrinsic softness to the younger fairy even her harshest lessons could not erase. It is a mistake she will not make again.)
Sixteen years she’d had in that strange stasis, body frozen but mind more and more alert as time passed. She is certain that Saul and Ben think, as Farah had, that she’d spent the time plotting out her revenge — but vengeance is a petty, small-minded thing. If she tramples on them and theirs in service of her cause, the fault lies with them for failing to see the bigger picture. She’s known from the start that the earth fairy is — as so many of his kind are — a creature of sentiment, but he had been useful once and can be again with the proper motivation. As for Saul … she had hoped he might see things her way, when he is and has always been a soldier first, but as with Farah the years have forced her to look at him differently. Let him be Luna’s problem. The Solarian queen owes her a great deal as it is; this will scarcely make a dent in those debts. (It would be a senseless waste, after all, to kill him if she can avoid it; he’d be far more useful on her side, and may yet be if he sees reason. Farah’s death, necessary though it proved, is already more waste than she’d wanted.)
Sixteen years, severely hampered by the wards of her prison, had done more than just weaken her magical reserves. She’d had her contingencies in place (always have at least one alternate strategy, she’d taught them, and those are words she still lives by) and so things had moved even then, and the linchpin to her plans is here now, and even if reforming Alfea into what is necessary will ruffle feathers, Rosalind Hale learns from her mistakes. She will not fail with Bloom as she did with Farah. Having been in the fire fairy’s mind, she knows there is a simmering rage there to be used. Bloom will never manage the dispassion needed to be a general (the dispassion Farah had once found, only to lose in the years after Aster Dell), but that’s not what Rosalind needs her to be, when every war has its soldiers — and its weapons. She has hers now, and beyond that has the will to do what is necessary. She knows, better than most, how hard the latter is to come by.
She finishes moving around the office, stripping away the pieces that are superfluous and revealing, bit by bit, the familiar spartan bones beneath the softness Farah had introduced. Underneath is stone, bare wood and metal, surfaces with the same utilitarian purpose that is all she permits in her day-to-day life. (Underneath is the past, the memory of ragged breathing, of magic arcing through the air to obliterate a nightmare — a nightmare that still lives despite her best efforts, but she will change that.) This is the world she knows. This is the world she needs around her, as she faces the war ahead. Whatever it costs, to her or to others, she will end this. She had sworn that years ago; she feels as strongly about that oath, that necessity, today.
(She does not think about why.)