Work Text:
Viola sat hunched by the bar, fiddling her cup in her hands, filled with some sparkling juice of some sort. Rodin was not easily convinced by pleas of can’t a girl have something to take the edge off when she’s trying to save the multiverse? She bet she had one or another storm-eyed witch’s cutting glare to blame for that.
Both elder witches certainly seemed eager to take the edge off for their own part. Bayonetta threw back another of those tiny pink shots, violet fumes wafting from the glass, elbow on the bartop and a gun languidly brandished. Jeanne sat on her other side, close enough the two witches’ shoulders brushed every time Bayonetta made another flourish of her weapon to punctuate a sentence. Jeanne, half-dead on the stool and a few more drinks deep than Bayonetta, let her head loll to rest on a puffed sleeve; Bayonetta didn’t break the momentum of her words, relating to their stoic bartender what had occurred in their latest encounter with another world. Another Arch-Eve they failed to save. More nigh-indecipherable taunts from Singularity that made Viola want to smash his stupid green cloud face in, even more than she already did.
Jeanne hiccuped, and Bayonetta smoothly swapped her gun from one hand to the other, newly freed fingers going to brush Jeanne’s scalp, a whisper of gold claws against mussed silver. Jeanne murmured, sounding merely moments from sleep right there on Bayonetta’s shoulder. Viola turned back to sipping her juice. She tried not to stare, but she could be forgiven for wanting to, constantly, always finding her eyes drawn to the witches she had found herself companion to. She couldn’t be blamed for the stab in her gut every time she looked upon Bayonetta’s face, so familiar, so completely, utterly different. She guessed Bayonetta herself understood the feeling, now, after all the Arch-Eves they’d seen and…Rosa.
Fighting alongside a stranger with her mother’s face and voice and smile made her want to claw her own heart out of her chest, obviously. But to put all of that aside, there was also a subtler, cloudier set of emotions at seeing this version of her mummy with Jeanne.
Her own Bayonetta had had a Jeanne, yes. And Viola had realized, lately, that she’d never seen her mother and that Jeanne do more than clasp hands. There’d always been…a distance, some invisible wall between them that Viola only really noticed now in memory while confronted with the constant shattering of it by their doppelgängers. These witches just couldn’t help themselves, always side by side, casual hands on shoulders or arms, tripping each other up or knocking weapons in greeting, smirks and banter passed around easy as minnows slipping down a stream. They both seemed…young, compared to the versions Viola had known, despite this Bayonetta technically having five hundred more waking years on Mummy. There was a burden missing from behind their eyes, one she couldn’t name, but identified through absence.
Viola had mulled it over quite a bit, in favor of other, worse things she had rattling in the back of her head. She mulled now, tapping her glass with a finger, the corner of her eye still attuned on her subjects of musing as Bayonetta leaned her cheek on Jeanne’s head for a brief moment before shaking her. Jeanne started alert and heaved herself upright, cursing as she spilled her drink. A resounding trill of familiar laughter split Viola’s ears.
Her own world’s Jeanne had been away for a long time. She’d been traveling the world, sending Mummy postcards and hand-written letters now and again that Bayonetta would show to little Viola, telling her about her amazing and cool auntie who would one day help train her in the Umbran Arts. Viola first met her, at least the first time she remembered, when she was six years old; Jeanne had stopped by fresh off the plane, motorcycle purring and platinum mane fluttering like a cape as she strode to greet them under the porch light, artificial yellow cast against the blue shadows of early dusk. She’d crouched down to give the wide-eyed child a thorough once-over, tilting up her chin with a rough hand, before popping a candy into Viola’s grubby palm, a gift from her travels. She hadn’t stayed for dinner; she remembered, or thought she could remember, Mummy's disappointed oh.
She did, eventually, train Viola, once she was older. Jeanne would come to pick her up in time for moonrise while her parents settled down to sleep, beat her to a pulp, then shove a green lollipop in her mouth before dropping her at home again, rarely venturing further than the driveway despite Mummy’s wave from the open door. On some nights, when Viola was especially frustrated by school or her friends or the difficulty of mastering Umbran techniques, Jeanne would wipe dirt off her cheek with a thumb and tell her she was made of the same strong stuff as any witch, as her Mummy. No use feeling sorry for yourself. It’ll all come in time.
Mummy had told her about all the adventures she and Jeanne had gotten up to, all that she could remember at least. Jeanne spoke very little of the past. Again, they had never done more than clasp hands, and even then, Viola recalled Mummy reaching for scarlet-clad fingers, and in a breath them being pulled away as if from a flash of embers. Jeanne had always been gruff, stern, standoffish. She didn’t like being touched, Viola had always known. The woman she was staring at now let her Bayonetta touch her with as much ease as if it was Jeanne’s own hand brushing the bangs out of her face or flicking dirt off her collarbone.
What had left Mummy staring after her Jeanne with a fixed, indiscernible smile, and Jeanne hardly daring to meet Bayonetta’s eyes at all? What all had happened, in the course of five hundred years, to mend, or perhaps never break, whatever had snapped in Viola’s world? Could it have mended again, if they had been given the time these two had?
It wouldn’t have ever been quite the same as these two, though, she reminded herself as Bayonetta planted a kiss on the corner of Jeanne’s mouth, a swift end to whatever they’d just begun bickering over. Her parents had been everything to each other, she was sure. Luka had looked at Mummy like she hung the moon and stars. Maybe, Viola’s happy family had simply left very little space for an independent, wanderlust witch.
Viola downed the dregs of her juice and pushed away, barstool scraping the floor hideously as she made her exit. “I’m gonna go…get some rest.”
“Sweet dreams, kitty!”
Viola winced, threw out a thumbs up, did not look back. She wished she’d never told them. Wished it had stayed her little secret, wish she’d kept her searching, devastated eyes all to herself. This Bayonetta’s awkward gentleness often felt worse than her utter disregard had. She didn’t look back to see if Jeanne, suspiciously quiet, was snoring on Bayonetta’s shoulder or cradling her waist or, whatever. It didn’t matter. She was only going to gnaw herself into oblivion, thinking so hard about things since past in a world long gone.