Sorry it took me ages, but here it is, finally. Chapter 6, in which I attempt to lay the groundwork for future developments. And build some personal Valkyrie-related myths in the process. I look forward to seeing what you guys think.
Thanks again for all the comments, reviews and favorites. Your support is overwhelming.
The usual disclaimer applies: I don't own Lost Girl or any of these characters.
Nobody knows how Valkyries are reborn exactly. It's one of the best guarded mysteries in Fae history, and even the oldest, most knowledgeable members of this supernatural society would not be able to give a clear answer. At best, they'd be able to present two hypotheses, neither of them backed by actual proof, but at least given some sort of legitimacy by their age. If nobody knew how long they'd been around, there had to be some truth about them, right?
Theories abounded, though. Tamsin didn't think this whole rebirth thing was such a big deal to the other Fae until she discovered that every century or so, a new theory popped out, claiming to be the one true explanation to the mystery, the only one you'd ever need to unlock the secrecy shrouding one of the world's oldest and most venerable Fae species. They always forget mentioning 'almost extinct…' Tamsin thought to herself.
She was lying on her back on the mattress after having successfully changed into the hospital scrubs Lauren had brought her. She felt ridiculous in the outfit. "Get Dr. Carter down here, I need 5 CCs of epi to the heart, stat!" she had tried cracking a joke but the guard just shot her a confused look and tightened the grip on his handgun. "No, nothing?" she finally asked. "Oh, man, how can you NOT have watched ER?!" she scoffed, while the soldier was doing his best to ignore her. He too had probably been told not to engage with her or go anywhere near the cage. This new guard was dressed in modern camouflage clothes and was armed to the teeth with what looked like state-of-the-art, equally modern weaponry. The Valkyrie was relieved to see they'd given up the medieval costumes – that was seriously one time in history that she did not want to revisit. Like, never. Just like the previous guard, he was wearing some sort of modified contacts – most likely specifically designed to deflect her abilities if she tried using them. She had seen several high-ranking officers in Bo's army wear these, and she made a mental note of asking Lauren about them; the doctor definitely had something to do with the design.
Seeing that the guard had no intention of indulging her and making conversation, the Valkyrie just went back to the mattress and managed to lie down, although her every bone and muscle was protesting the effort. She hoped she'd be able to get some sleep but instead found herself thinking about Valkyries and their rebirth.
Some theories suggested that Valkyries were reborn out of light – that whenever they would die, a blinding ball of light that came out of nowhere would consume their corpse and remold it into a toddler. A living baby born of ashes. Which sounded so heroic that Tamsin was practically gagging whenever she thought of the possibility.
Other scholars had hypothesized that Odin himself would descend upon a Valkyrie's dying place and breathe new life and vigor into that battered body so she could continue her mission and serve her creator. The theory had its merits, but it failed to explain A) how come the Valkyries were not coming back as adults, but as babies and B) why they had a fixed number of life cycles. After all, the one-eyed old fool could just snap his fingers and allow them to go on forever. It would have been more… sanitary and efficient, Tamsin thought. Why bother going through the whole rebirth thing if you'd be back to square one every goddamn time, and apparently with no lesson to learn. It didn't make sense.
One of Tamsin's personal favorites was the one attributing the rebirth to Odin's ravens rather than to the great Norse god himself. The ravens were thought to descend to Midgard on the tail of a comet, picking all sorts of cosmic elements along the way, to remold the fallen Valkyrie. Tamsin had always felt close to Huggin and Munnin, who were incredibly smart and great conversationalists, but they had absolutely nothing to do with the process – let alone even try to put back together the body of a reborn Valkyrie using nothing but stardust and dark matter.
The truth, in fact, was far from being so glamorous. A small trace of it could be found in each and every one of the most popular theories, if you knew where to look, but the rebirth process was nothing like those romanticized stories and myths that the whole Fae culture was so crazy about. If it wasn't in a book twice the size of a detailed compendium of British monarchs and their close and distant relatives, then it wasn't worth knowing.
Tamsin could now remember each of her rebirths with astounding clarity. That hadn't always been the case, as the whole process was so confusing and messy that only bits and pieces were left, especially after being filtered through the eyes of a newborn who had the dormant mind of an ancient creature. But now that this was her last lifecycle she found herself remembering things she had thought long forgotten, and she could remember them in such vivid, clear detail as if they had happened yesterday.
This last time, she had been lucky that Dyson found her. She hadn't always been that lucky in the past. She had come back to nothing and no one to look after her too many times to keep count. Coming back as a newborn, there wasn't much she could do than cry and yell at the top of her lungs until she'd pass out. She would wake up a little older, still yelling and crying, but also hungry, naked and cold, and more confused than ever. Gradually, she would be able to move around a bit, her survival instincts kicking in and practically forcing her to look for food and shelter. There wasn't much of either on a battlefield, which was where Tamsin had died more deaths than she liked to admit. Eventually she would cuddle next to the body of a fallen soldier, most likely a soldier she herself had killed before being taken out by a lucky shot, and she would cry herself to sleep again, gnawing on the only edible thing she could generally find in the vicinity – a bone with a few strips of flesh still on it. She never knew if it came from a horse or a human or other animal that had fallen in battle. She didn't want to know, but as soon as she was old enough to speak she would refuse to ever swallow any kind of meat ever again.
The memories were coming back in bits and pieces, fortunately. If they had come back all at once she would have had an aneurysm within 48 hours of her rebirth every time and burned through all of her life cycles like a bloody mayfly. By the time her body fully matured she would remember most of it. But not like now. Even several years after the rebirth, she was still remembering. Sometimes the memories came back so violently that she almost passed out. She could now confidently map out almost her entire existence to date, in a non-linear sequence but still.
However, no matter how hard she thought, there was one spot her mind could not penetrate. It felt like a void of sorts yet a full one, as strange as it might sound. She sensed its presence, but no matter how she tried to approach it, she was never quite able to grasp it. Almost like it had been put under lock and key. She pondered what it was for a while, she even went to see doctors, witches and a Fae shaman for help. The shaman gave her a strange potion to drink that tasted like crap, chanted an incantation but then freaked out all of a sudden and practically kicked her out of his house. He begged her to never come anywhere near him again. She was too surprised to protest at first, and when she went back for explanations the next day, there was no trace of the man and his family, all 40 of them, left anywhere. That was the last time she asked for help or tried to look into that hidden corner of her mind. Some things are better left asleep. And if someone had gone through so much trouble to put whatever that thing was away and bury it so deep inside her mind, they must have had a damn good reason, the Valkyrie reasoned. She didn't spend too much time thinking about it after that.
Her mind drifted to how she had come to be in this situation. In all honesty, Tamsin hadn't set out planning to be taken prisoner – her initial plan was quite simple and straightforward: go to war, fight, get to Bo and kill her or die trying. But Bo wasn't on the battlefield. Her lapdog was, so she did her best to hurt him badly enough that the succubus would show up eventually and seek revenge. That didn't work, and her soldiers were dying in high numbers, so she was left with only one choice. Embark on what was most likely going to be the most stupid, desperate kamikaze mission in Fae history and allow herself to be captured, beaten, broken and humiliated, in hope that somewhere along the way she'd get close enough to Bo to take her out. Or die trying.
So yes, there was a pattern there. No matter what path she'd choose, it would inevitably end up with her dead. For good this time. That was actually the biggest ace up her sleeve if all else went to shit. Just like the rebirth process, the final death of a Valkyrie was shrouded in mystery. The fact that the very few people who had witnessed such a singular event had not survived to tell the story only made the secret more inaccessible. When their time came, most Valkyries simply disappeared from existence, everybody knew that. What was less common knowledge was that they retreated someplace remote and without a living soul anywhere around them for miles, not necessarily because they wanted to keep the nature of their demise a secret, but because they didn't want any innocent bystander to get hurt.
And hurt was an understatement here, Tamsin thought. A Valkyrie's last death was hard to put into words. She had witnessed the event only a handful of times in all the thousands of years she'd been around, and the closest term of comparison she could think of was 'like Hiroshima, only with less smoke and screaming.' That's because nobody had time to scream. It had the same magnitude as a nuclear disaster only that it looked more like a gigantic implosion that sucked the sound and life out of everything and everyone on a few mile radius. It was as silent, sudden and inescapable as death in space.
So when she'd been dragged in front of Bo, Tamsin was quite at peace with herself and her decision. She had to get Lauren and Kenzi out first, and seeing the doctor's reaction to her public humiliation at the hands of the wolf shifter was exactly what she was hoping for: that the human would still care, that she would still have her annoying common sense to tell her that was wrong, despite what everybody else seemed to think. Once the humans would get out of harm's way, she would do her best to kill Bo, and if she would survive the attempt, Tamsin wouldn't complain. If not, she'd just let them kill her and her death would take the succubus with her. Along with the rest of her stupid puppet council.
Well, that until she realized there was still something there of the old Bo that was worth saving. No matter what she'd gone through, there was still some part of the real Bo hanging tight, waiting for the first chance to break out, to reclaim herself. And Tamsin had to try, she owed it to Bo and Lauren and Kenzi. She owed it to herself. She was pretty sure the bond they had, which was still there, although weak and hanging by a single thread, could be used to bring back that part of Bo and exorcise the Valhalla out of her friend, along with anything else that had hitched a ride to the real world on her back. The doctor would know what to do, for sure.
Tamsin wasn't delusional. Even if this new plan was successful, that wouldn't mean everybody would live happily ever after. She was certain she would die anyway, and that was all right, her death would mean something this time. It would bring Bo and everything else back to normal.
The only problem putting a rather major dent in her plans was that right now, after seeing Lauren again – the wonderful, impossibly beautiful, impossibly stubborn Lauren -, Tamsin really didn't want to die anymore.
When she had let the prison tent after seeing Tamsin, the doctor's head was spinning with all the unasked questions she hadn't had the chance to bring up. She was angry at herself for allowing the Valkyrie to get under her skin so easily, but who was she fooling? It wasn't like she had put up much of a fight. She was angry at herself for not bringing up the dream; that was the whole reason she had decided to go see Tamsin personally anyway. Or was it?...
Lauren was confused but she wasn't stupid. Tamsin may have been once good at hiding what she was thinking or feeling, but not in this last life. The doctor had figured out that there was something more to how Tamsin was looking at her and treating her, even before the war, before she'd left. Neither of them had ever said anything and how could they? Lauren herself wasn't entirely sure she wasn't imagining it, maybe the Valkyrie was just playing with her like she did with everybody else, in that exasperating way of hers of acting and talking that made it impossible to tell when she was serious. If she was ever serious at all.
The doctor was actually relieved and grateful Tamsin had never said anything about what was between them either, that had definitely saved both of them a world of embarrassment. The answer would have been 'no,' of course. What other answer could there be with Bo there? Yet if she were to be entirely honest, she had always been intrigued. Intrigued by how someone so arrogant and annoying could also become one of the sweetest, most caring creatures she'd met, all in the span of five minutes or less. In all the years working with human and Fae patients, rarely had she seen one so inconsistent in behavior. The Valkyrie sometimes switched between emotional states with the fervor and frequency of a madly swinging pendulum. It was strange and, based on their previous interactions, totally uncharacteristic of the blonde Fae – the doctor was well aware Tamsin had been anything but fickle before her last rebirth.
She wondered if it had to do with this being her last life cycle or if it was Kenzi's influence. But then it hit her: Tamsin was only acting this way around her. Connecting the dots was easy then. The Valkyrie had feelings for her. And by the looks of it, she was struggling to keep them under lid.
And judging by how their 'reunion' had gone down just now, those feelings were still there. Lauren didn't know how to react, so she just ignored the elephant in the room, as she did before. But what made it worse was that unlike before, when she was just flattered and maybe a little curious, the doctor found herself considering what it would be like to reciprocate those feelings. What it would be like to be loved by Tamsin. The idea scared her, it was wrong to even think it. Not to mention way too late.
Lost in thought, she allowed her feet to carry her back to her own tent instead of heading back to the celebration and Bo. She was sorry she had to leave Kenzi there alone but she just couldn't put up with anyone right now, especially that there would be questions about Tamsin and her injuries, and the last thing she wanted to think about now was the Valkyrie. She needed to clear her head and figure out how to put all those wrong thoughts away for good. She needed Valium and a lot of sleep.
To her great chagrin, the universe seemed to have other plans in store. As she turned a corner, she bumped into the familiar figure of a tall man clad in dark clothing. Dyson. Just the person she really didn't want to see.
"Lauren, hey," he said in his trademark low voice.
"Oh Dyson, hi, sorry, you startled me…"
He ignored her comment and eyed her suspiciously. "What are you doing here? Are you heading back to the party?"
"Actually, no, I was going to head back to my tent, try to get some sleep…" She paused, waiting to see if he'd say anything. He didn't but there was something in his attitude that urged her to go on. "It's been a very long, tiresome day…"
"That it has been, indeed," he nodded. "You did well today, Lauren. A lot of good people will get to see their loved ones again due to you. Myself included."
She shifted her weight uncomfortably and just smiled. "It was nothing," she managed eventually. "Being my job and all…"
"How's Tamsin?" he asked abruptly. The question caught Lauren off guard. She knew it shouldn't have because sooner or later she was bound to report to someone about the Valkyrie's state, but she just hoped it would be later rather than sooner. She hoped she would have more time until she'd have to talk about it. The encounter had felt so personal that she surprisingly found herself unwilling to share any of the details just yet. So her response to Dyson's question was not necessarily what she had intended it to be, and it certainly wasn't the healthiest course of action for her – a mere human caught up in a Fae war.
"Do you even care?" she retorted sharply. To her surprise, Dyson lowered his eyes and made a long pause before answering. He seemed remorseful somehow.
"Look, Lauren, I know that… display earlier was not something you'd condone. And normally I wouldn't either, but it was necessary."
"It was barbaric, that's what it was," she raised her voice, throwing caution to the gutter.
"It's war, Lauren, you of all people should know. Our team needed the morale boost. She would have done the same," Dyson countered.
"I don't know why but I highly doubt that. She's one of us, Dyson, no matter all the bad blood between us. I mean, don't get me wrong, do I think she betrayed us, betrayed Bo? Yes! Does she deserve to be punished? Yes again! But she didn't deserve… that," she ended, disgust and disappointment seeping through her voice.
She was aware she was letting it all out on Dyson but thinking that it should have been Bo there, at the receiving end of her anger, not him. The thought made her sick. She considered briefly whether to continue or not and eventually decided in favor. What the hell, too late to back off now… "She let you live, Dyson."
The shifter had a confused look on his face and opened his mouth to ask for an explanation, but there was no stopping Lauren now. "Your injuries, they were bad, yes. But they were carefully calculated, none of them serious enough to actually kill you. Tamsin wanted to spare you," she finished smugly. Why was she enjoying this so much?
The shifter stared at her in disbelief for a while, a hint of regret washing over his face. He nodded, but kept silent.
"Fine," she sighed. "She was hurt pretty badly, but with the proper care and plenty of rest she'll be okay in no time. She'll live."
"Good," he said after a long pause. Something changed in his attitude then and a vicious smile crept across his face. "Gotta say, Lauren, that last remark was pretty coldhearted, even for you," he snickered. "She won't live… well, not for long anyway," he added when he noticed the confused look on the doctor's face.
"But… but that's ridiculous… you can't…" was all that Lauren managed to get out.
"It's already done," he said, satisfied he'd gotten his payback. "Bo called the council, they'll convene in three weeks to decide how to execute her. Until then, she'll be thoroughly interrogated and we'll learn everything she knows about the resistance and where Trick might be hiding."
"You mean tortured," Lauren said coldly, trying to ignore the overwhelming hurt and anger that ripped through her so violently that all she wanted to do was smash Dyson's face in.
"That's one way of putting it. But she's a big girl, she can take it." The doctor was too shocked to say anything else. Dyson waited for a while, but seeing that no reply was coming, he gave her a nod and turned to leave. He took a few steps then stopped abruptly as if he'd just remembered something, "And Lauren," he started, turning to face the doctor again, "it's time to man up. Bo wants you to oversee the interrogations… make sure the prisoner stays alive until the execution."
The doctor was grateful she hadn't eaten much that day. Her stomach revolted and as soon as Dyson was a safe distance away she started throwing up, allowing all the vile things that had happened in the last 24 hours to pour out of her along with all the alcohol she'd had.