A/N: This is an expanded one-shot from the drabble that I wrote for the only one for you. You can find it in drabble form in my drabble collection, Tales of Another Life, chapter 3. We heard about this in The Reckoning – now we will see how Diane (Tori's mom) tried to win over Kit. Please read and review!
Disclaimer: I don't own The Darkest Powers series.
The supernatural world was a place where change was not welcome. There weren't any new races; there hadn't been any in centuries nor had there been any significant improvements to the existing ones, minus the sorcerers. They had increased their power and influence more than any other race would have thought possible. They weren't always like they are perceived as today. They didn't one day wake up with an immense power.
No, that wasn't how it happened. Or at least, not the truth in what happened.
Since the existence of wizards and witches, witches had always been the stronger and more formidable of the two races. Their spells had practical use, important safety usages. The sorcerers mostly flitted with flashy parlor tricks. Some specialized so much in that that a separate minor branch split off and they were only able to perform parlor tricks. They eventually came to be known as magicians and they hated witches even more than the sorcerers.
Witches, in a lapse of judgment, shared their powers and abilities with sorcerers. They paid dearly for their error. The sorcerers, drunk with their newfound power, raised awareness of witches and turned the ones that had helped them into the Inquisition. The most powerful of witches died because of it, many young enough that they had not born any children, the power in those bloodlines lost forever.
One of the last powerful witches managed to find a spell that would hopefully cease any and all interaction with sorcerers. The gift of knowing – a witch merely had to look into the eyes of a man to tell if he was sorcerer or not. It did not matter if he was nearing one hundred or one day old, the witch would know.
Over time, the witches organized into the Coven, a place where witches could learn the history of those who came before and how to achieve their true potential. Today, however, the Coven has fallen into a dark time. The Coven barely teaches any spells, merely teaching how to hide their abilities.
However, there is light at the tunnel. A group of scientists are working to help engineer a new generation of witches, ones that won't have to cower from sorcerers and their Cabals. Even more exciting, there is a confirmed witch-sorcerer hybrid, something that has not happened in hundreds of years. A witch managed to seduce a sorcerer and had a female child. The witch herself is amongst the most powerful of her generation and does not shy from using the darker powers as our foremothers once did.
She managed this completely on her own. There was not any technological intervention. It was simply nature.
If it can happen once, it can happen again.
Diane scanned over the personnel files. She hadn't raised any eyebrows when she had asked for the names and headshots of any sorcerer that worked at this branch. It was a well-known fact that witches despised sorcerers. The clerk – some sort of half-demon – simply shrugged it off. It wasn't a breach in protocol or privacy. With the amount of increasing violence towards witches, it seemed reasonable that a witch might want to know how many potential threats were in the building.
Or at least, Diane let her think so. As far as she knew, there hadn't been any conflict in the nearby area for some time now. Everyone was being paid extremely well to mind their manners here.
At least with the photographs, they weren't as revolting they were in person.
"How on earth did she do it," she muttered to herself. Eve Levine was a perfectly respectable witch, in her opinion. Had her life been slightly different, she could easily see herself having gone down that path, learning more dark magic than light, dealing with crooks, and making a very comfortable living doing nothing but magic.
She knew of Eve. She never met her in person. She wasn't sure if she was in awe or jealous. Her reputation was something to take notice of. There weren't many witches that were kicked out the Coven for studying dark magic. Diane's own family left the Coven generations ago, fed up with the restrictions they were trying to impose. She was proud of her bloodline. She could trace it back to the Inquisition, back when witches were superior in all regards to sorcerers and everyone acknowledged it.
Eve was something of an enigma. Seducing a sorcerer and having a child, a witch-sorcerer hybrid. Of course, the child was technically a witch since she was a daughter, but having the sorcerer blood would prove very interesting to watch over the next twenty years.
Eve might have found a way for the bloodlines to receive a desperate need of power. If this worked, it would change everything.
It wasn't an ideal way to spend her Friday night, but it would pay off, she was sure of it. A glass of wine, take-out and a pile full of photos that only slightly made her want to vomit.
"Too bad there isn't a work up on their families," she said to herself. There wouldn't be any St. Clouds, Nasts, Cortezes, or Boyds in this bunch. All of those important sorcerers kept close to their Cabals. Eve had somehow managed to snag a Nast, supposedly the heir to the Nast Cabal itself. Secrets travelled fast in the witch community.
She flitted through them, barely giving most of them more than a five second glance.
She found one that didn't instantly make her want to hurl. Perhaps this could be something she could work with.
She double checked the file she had stowed away in her purse. She was going to do her best today and get a read on the situation.
Bae. It was a wonder that she hadn't run into him before. He was one of the few lawyers at this branch. She generally didn't go to that side of the building, but it was still slightly surprising she never saw him in the hallways before.
She took in a deep breath. She was outside of his door. She was nervous – she hadn't been expecting that. It was just a sorcerer and it wasn't as though she'd never picked up a man before. She simply never expected to be in the situation where picking up a man could have significant ramifications for her kind.
She knocked on the door and after a moment, it opened.
"Can I help you?"
Inwardly Diane winced. She unintentionally had made direct eye contact and she had to quickly recover from it. She didn't have to know his opinion on witches, he was a sorcerer, there could only be one opinion.
"Sorry, were you expecting someone else," he asked again.
She was caught off guard. She noticed that he didn't have the look almost ever sorcerer had once they discovered she was a witch.
Perhaps she could make this work.
"No, I … Mr. Bae, right? I was going over some paperwork and you name jumped out. I liked to put faces to names, it helps me remember we're all in this together," Diane said, trying to come up with something. Her carefully rehearsed plan had left her head. "I'll let you get back to your work. I'm Diane, by the way, Diane Enright."
"You're in acquisitions?"
"Mostly," she forced herself to grin. "I dabble every now and then when I have a chance to sneak down to the laboratory. If we are able to achieve what we're hoping, it will be a better world for our children, wouldn't you say?"
"It'd certainly make things easier."
An awkward moment hung between them and Diane glanced down at her watch. "Oh, I have a meeting I'm going to be late if I don't leave now. It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Bae."
"You can call me Kit."
Diane gave him a nod and hurried down the hallway, making a show for her nonexistent meeting that she was late for.
She managed to find ways of bumping into Kit at least once a week. She didn't want to seem as though she was planning something – although obviously she was – but she also needed to get acclimated to seeing him. She couldn't achieve her goals if she wanted to sneer at him every time they made eye contact. Admittedly, there didn't necessarily need to be any eye contact in order to achieve results, but she wasn't going to risk this blowing up in her face if it didn't take the first time.
She needed to make it something that was repeatable.
Gods forbid, she needed a relationship.
She tried hinting at him. She'd mention something that she saw was going on in town or something that was happening over the weekend in the city. He never seemed to give any more than polite interest. Regular men were infuriating enough with their lack of committal answers and not listening, dealing with a sorcerer added a new layer of frustration to it. He was too polite. He reminded her of witches that she had come into contact throughout the years.
She tried dressing up, but only slightly. She gradually incorporated more fitted skirts, a lower neckline, hell she even started going to the gym.
She found herself running into a brick wall. Nothing was working like it should. She had never gone through this amount of effort to land any man and gods forbid that she have to do it ever again.
Diane thought about giving up, just throwing in the towel. It would be easier. Flukes do happen in nature. A one-time occurrence doesn't necessarily mean that it would be guaranteed to happen again. What if she did get pregnant only to find out that she was carrying a male child? What would she do then? She knew historically that it would be significant, but what would she do? Could she handle raising a child that disgusted her? Would he disgust her?
Diane never stayed inside her head too long. It only proved to create new problems and never any useful answers.
Maybe she just needed a break from all of this. Maybe Kit needed time to miss her. Men always want what they can't have.
The problem with taking a break is that it is too easy to never end it. A short rest turns into a longer one and soon, there doesn't seem to be any point in starting up since it would be essentially the same as starting from scratch.
Six months. She had given herself a six month respite from sorcerer chasing.
It did amuse her that during her break that Kit still sought her out on occasion. It was never for anything significant, but he chose to go to her when he could just as easily handled matters with a non-witch.
Maybe she was on to something.
It was time to step things up. She needed to either something done soon. Either her daughter would be a hybrid or just one of the other witch experiments. She had invested years into trying to make the hybrid idea work.
Years.
She was tired of waiting.
"I know a great little bar not too far," Diane said as she leaned against the doorway to Kit's office. "We could slip away, enjoy a little bit of happy hour, maybe take the edge off things a little bit…"
Things had been more stressed than usual. Finding willing subjects and remaining discrete was proving to be harder than they originally thought.
"I'm busy," Kit replied.
"You can't tell me you haven't considered it," she helped herself to a chair. He didn't reply. She sighed and waited a few moments.
"We both want to shape the future, so why not?"
Kit stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. His usual easy to read face was gone, replaced by something akin to stone.
"I haven't, actually."
Diane smirked. "Of course, you haven't. Surely you've heard about the only living hybrid? Don't you want to make history?" She walked into his office, closing the door behind her and sat down on a chair in front of his desk.
"That is the reason why I'm here," he replied tersely. "Introducing hybrids isn't going to make things easier for anyone."
"Oh come on," she replied. "It will force everyone to reevaluate their prejudices. If a Nast heir can be with a witch, why can't anyone else? What is forbidding it?"
"Taboos are taboos for a reason," he said, going back to his work. "Wait – is … is this was this entire thing was about, the entire time?" He stopped and laughed. "You want us to create a life. Us."
"Why not?"
"A million reasons why not! It's not authorized, if the St. Clouds found out –"
"You and I both know that now that everyone knows about the Levine girl that the other Cabals are going to try to have one of their own. Think of the rewards we would be given. We are talking about the future."
Kit stood up and walked over to Diane, pausing to lean back on his desk, crossing his arms as he surveyed her.
"I simply thought you were being nice all of this time."
Diane rolled her eyes. "Of course I was being nice. You're nice to people and people tend to be nice back. That is how it all works."
"Yes, but you're being nice on an agenda. That is something that is inherently dishonest and invalidates everything."
"So," Diane stood and smoothed out some wrinkles from her skirt, "I take that this is a no?"
"I have already done my part to contribute to the experiment. There doesn't need to be another."
She made it to the door before Kit stopped her.
"I did enjoy our friendship. I want you to know that I was genuine on my end."
She gnashed her teeth and gave no reply. She wanted to zap him, burn him, do something to him. She had been made a fool for years while everyone knew. She left the office seething.
A perk of being excellent at work was the promotions and the promotions had lent her a status where she could virtually walk into any space and no one would question it.
No one lifted an eyebrow when she went into the laboratory the next week and removed samples from the freezer.
Doing it this way was easier, she told herself. It was one thing to think that a relationship would be possible for this to work, but science always won out.
She had everything she needed to set witches back on their proper track.
