Paying dues
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to their respective owners.
The world swam in a grey haze before Eva's eyes, as it hadn't done before for a long time. "Where, where am I?" she muttered weakly, even as her eyes began to make out a vague shape standing some distance away from her.
"Well, mum, we're in Addis Abeba, if you're in for such sort of thing," came the flippant, almost familiar reply. "Thought I just bring you here to pay my dues."
The general familiarity – not to mention some of the details – stirred something rather familiar, though forgotten (by several decades) in Eva's mind and breast. "Bo? Is that you?" she spoke the first name that came to her confused mind.
"No, mum. It's your other, the half-blood daughter!"
Now Eva's eyes opened wide as her disastrous – though necessary at that time – marriage to a mortal man resurfaced in her memory. "Little Hellion? I mean-"
"Yes, mother," Eva's interlocutrix smiled with surprisingly little humour and plenty of bitterness. "'S me. I found you at last. In a dungeon too, I should add."
"And you-? How-? You're human, not one of us, not truly," Eva said, weakly, feeling unsure for the first time since her first escape from a dungeon.
"My friend Kuro here insists that I am a sorceress. I'm not. But I have certain skills that may be considered magic," her interlocutrix replied, "so freeing you from there and brining you here wasn't easy, but doable. And I did it."
"Why?" Eva asked, quietly. "I may be your mother, but there's no love lost."
"That's what humans do, I'm afraid. They protect each other, especially family members," was the reply. "Still, you can consider it my last interference in your life. Maybe my dues were paid-"
"So, no family visits?" Eva asked, sounding almost like her old self.
"Don't won't to intrude on your privacy with my flawed self-"
"You know, it's funny, but I guess while I came too closely in making you in my image, Bo's stepmother did the same thing with her – between the two of you, you can make either one great human, or one great fey."
"Bo," was the slow reply, as the other woman practically tasted the new name. "My half-sister?"
"Yes. I think... she showed me what you could've been if I was a different person," Eva admitted quietly. "I'm sorry, Little Hellion."
The other woman sat down, hard. "I've wanted to hear these words for years, mother, and now that I have... it hurts. It hurts more than I thought it would." A pause. "I intended to fully leave you once I brought you here, thought that that would pay my dues as a daughter-"
"And you still can, for you're probably right," Eva agreed, quietly. "I said to you a lot of things that didn't even warrant this rescue, but, maybe, we can make it right, somehow?"
"...I recognize this look...from the mirror...when I think of a plan. Usually, these plans backfired – spectacularly. But...it'll be interesting to experience what it's like to be on the receiving end of one such plan for a change. Want me to visit you tomorrow?"
"Yes, I would like that," Eva nodded, "come visit me, please, and maybe we'll be able to fix what we have ruined."
The end (for now).