Disclaimer: I own nothing, none of the character's mentioned are mine. I take no credit, get no money. Sadly.
Author's Note: First one-shot in this fandom. It's kind of a philosophical character study by way of Tamsin ruminating after 4x08.
Love. It called to her on the battlefield, like a Siren's song on the winds of the sea. It would leave its mark on the souls of the warriors who experienced it. Mixed with their valor, it would become a potent cocktail that even other fae would hone in on. They often went to Freyja's dominion, and Tamsin hated to lose such honorable spirits to that wench.
It made sense, to a certain degree, but it never ceased to agitate her every time it happened.
This was a unique sense in the field of battle. The way of things was to decide who the victors would be before the first sword was unsheathed, the first musket was loaded, or the first shell was fired. The Valkyrie race did not, as a rule, care about love and loss, they only cared about which worthy souls would be coming to Valhalla.
Tamsin found this to be incredibly mundane, and lacking in any kind of lively experience. She did enjoy picking a side, and thus an overall winner, but she preferred letting the humans decide which of their warriors she would be picking from.
It was her only way to disconnect her heightened awareness of those who loved and were loved on the battlefield. If she didn't have to choose them as a soul to later take upon their death, then those whispers of guilt and desolation wouldn't be so loud in her dreams.
Love was something which was understood, yet not fully comprehended by the Valkyrie species. They were able to and did love – but warriors and heroes only. Humans and fae alike who would eventually be chosen by one of her sisters to be taken to Valhalla, or would be lost forever to Freyja. Every love was bittersweet, as she, just like her sisters, knew that a warrior's life was based in death.
It was because of this knowledge, that in all of the millennia which Tamsin had lived, she had only loved twice before.
The first was when she was still a child in the eyes of the gods. A mere two lives into her existence.
He had been a glorious warrior. One who had been brought up to lead, and did so with a steady hand, a cool head, and a quick mind. She had found him nursing his camel's ankle at a riverbed in Heracleopolis in 2102 B.C.E. His tenderness was what caught her attention. It was his heightened awareness of his equal dependency on the animal; its health and survival was tied to his own.
Of course, it was not to be, and she should have known it. It was her youth and innocence in love and loss which kept her from protecting her heart.
His soul was plucked from a battle with Thebes at the turn of the millennium, and Tamsin could only watch in agony as one of her sisters ushered him off to Valhalla.
The second time was in Venice in 1425, mere months before the Republic went to war with Milan. She had been caught off guard upon seeing the warrior, as she hid her sex well from the others. It was curiosity which brought her to the heroine's door. Lust followed. Love took her by surprise. This time however, Tamsin had tried to disengage herself as the warrior went off to do battle. Joining her sisters on the eve of the battle of Maclodio, Tamsin began to hope that, with the knowledge that the Venetians would be victorious, her lover would come out alive.
It was a foolish hope.
And so, with a heavy heart, Tamsin began turning to mercenary work more frequently to distract herself. Her targets were fewer in number, and she had a clear objective, thus giving her the illusion of protecting her heart.
Being a mercenary wasn't new to her, she still had a few jobs left unfinished from several previous lives, but it became something she took to with more frequency than wars. The largest wars drew her away from her isolated life, where the smell of fresh blood and the sight of large-scale battle brought out her most powerful abilities.
Lovers were more frequent. Tamsin took many over her lifetimes. She had long since lost count. Long since stopping caring about the number. If they were fae, they would understand what she was and what her presence represented. It often made their soul a better choice once they had died. If they were human, Tamsin made herself more elusive. It usually kept them interested, but often caused them to die sooner, and not always for the better. For this reason, her ratio of human to fae lovers was always more heavily stacked to one side.
Tamsin reveled in being a Valkyrie, being Dark fae, but her guilt from love and loss throughout the millennia wore on her dreams. Turned them into nightmares.
So, it was a tired, worn down Valkyrie, who had befriended alcohol to dull the guilt, and adopted a caustic personality as her only protection against loss, that met Bo at the Clubhouse after hearing about her in a Dark fae bar nearly halfway across the globe.
She had travelled long and far, met with the infamous Morrigan of this territory, took on a human cover job, and begrudgingly joined forces with a Light fae werewolf in order to meet her. She had only one contract still open from a previous life as a mercenary, and she knew, within days of meeting Bo, that this was the prize which she had never believed to be real.
She had felt the love singing in Bo's blood the instant they met. On the battlefield, she would be the one Tamsin watched.
It was with this knowledge that Tamsin had begun to try for the first time, to change the fate of her species. She wanted Bo to win. To succeed. To live. Against all odds. Against the gods.
When she fell in love with Bo was a little harder to pin down, not to mention both surprising and agonizing.
Her rebirth and the short, but the loving upbringing which Kenzi and Bo had given her fundamentally changed her in ways which had never happened before. Her most recent life's memories were sharp in her mind, and she winced when she thought of how detached and callous she had been to all of those who were currently in her newest life.
She knew that she had been hard on Bo in the beginning. Acting on instinct, she had wanted to create distance before any type of bond could form. If she was indeed the prize for the Being who had contracted her services, Tamsin didn't want to feel anything once she handed Bo over. Bo was unlike any fae she had ever met before, however, and had slowly worked her way into Tamsin's heart without even trying to.
The world was not black and white, and very few fae saw that, often blinded by the rules and skewed beliefs of the Light or Dark sides. But Bo, by remaining unaligned, by aiding both sides as she saw fit, by making her allies a mixture of Light, Dark, and human, she rose above the din, and in the coming battles, Tamsin knew the Valkyries would fight over who would pluck her spirit from the fallen.
There was a human word of a capability she had come to use to help describe her ability in battle; it did not fit perfectly, but was the closest she could come to verbally explaining it.
Empathy.
All humans had the capacity for it. Some fae fed off of it. Beyond that it remained an ambiguous entity that either was ignored, abused, or a powerful tool.
She saw it in Bo's eyes whenever she chose to help another living being who needed aid. Perhaps that affinity was what drew her closer to Bo without realizing that she was letting the Succubus in. Not that Bo even knew.
Sometimes, it takes a semi-drunk confession in a bathtub to realize how far past the safe line you've gone.