"Are you just going to stand there?" Levana asked quietly.

She was sprawled on her pearlescent throne, her glamour gone, her face hidden into her arms. Scarlet could swear she'd seen Cinder in more queenly positions.

"I've come to kill you." The gun, normally so comfortable in her hands, felt foreign and heavy. "Mother."

"Oh, there we go." The queen rose shakily. "Finally, an acknowledgement."

How could she? How could her mother, the person she'd missed almost more than Grandmere, be this...this monster? Everything she had lost was because of this woman.

"I love you." Scarlet said clearly.

Levana looked taken aback. "And I missed you." The broken queen shrugged her shoulders and began to descend down the dais. "It doesn't matter, obviously. Love is a war." She waved her hand over the hell that was the throne room. "How ironic. The daughter who was my life comes to take it from me."

Scarlet fingered the gun. "Did you know that Luc is dead?"

Her mother gave a braying burst of laughter. "I should hope so; I'm the one who ordered it. I told you, my sweet child, that love is a war."

"Is that why you cut my finger off?"

"Some might consider it a form of discipline. Be glad I took your finger, and not your hand."

Levana was broken; more than anyone she'd ever seen, more than her father. But broken as she was, she was still sane. And everything she said, she meant.

"But why did you take it?"

"You would not tell me where that cyborg was. Your cousin. I only hated her because she would take what was yours."

"What is that?"

Levana touched Scarlet's face. She could feel the blood on her mother's lithe fingers. "Luna, of course. You were to be queen."

Scarlet took a step back.

"Everything I have done is for you; to find you. To declare you as my own and die in peace, knowing my beautiful daughter would take my place."

"I refuse to be a queen." Scarlet was afraid now.

"Oh, that's not a problem anymore. Selene will be queen. Even if everything went back the way it used to be, nobody would put a lupine soldier on the throne. Oh, no dear." She added, seeing the defensive look on her face. "Don't get me wrong. Ze'ev- Wolf- is a lovely boy."

"He is."

"But my girl, I truly wanted you on the throne, not only because I love you, but because you have no gift."

Levana finally embraced her daughter. "If a queen had no gift, perhaps this hell would end." She whispered brokenheartedly. "And you have no gift, and I love you for that."

Scarlet embraced her mother as tightly as she could. "Love is a war." She said, and Levana closed her eyes as Scarlet brought the gun to her mother's head.

Happy Mother's Day. This was written really late at night for my twelve-year-old sister, and she didn't like it because it didn't have Wolflet. So I hope you guys like it, or are at least slightly disturbed by it.