The darkness pressed close around her, still whining, still creeping through every crack and crevice, searching and hungry. Bo shivered against the cold, and though she could feel a slow warmth begin to gather deep in her belly, her fingers were still frozen, and even her bones felt like they would never thaw out. She could feel the struggle within her begin to gather, she had a battle yet to fight, and knew she had a direction for it, and in the cold, lonely, empty darkness, that made all the difference.
Her eyes felt like they were glued shut, and her limbs still felt heavy and burdened. And though strength began to build in her thin, shivering frame, she wasn't strong enough yet to throw off the icy darkness that still curled around her and tried to take her away. But she knew she had something to fight for, was beginning to understand where she'd gone wrong, and was beginning to see where she might begin to make it right. She remembered her first encounter with the Fae, with the self-serving, cruel, prideful creatures who cared about nothing but themselves, and treated each other and the humans they fed on with short-sighted negligence, unnecessary cruelty, and haughty dismissal. She'd experienced far more kindness, forgiveness and generosity from any one human she'd ever encountered than she'd ever experienced from all the Fae together – with the exception of Trick, Dyson, and Hale, and perhaps even Tamsin.
Now, she remembered. She knew where her loyalties lay, and where her heart would lead her. She was the unaligned Succubus, and she remembered why she chose to remain unaligned three years ago, and chose to remain unaligned again, baptized herself in the cold, shriveling darkness that surrounded her now and still, relentlessly, tried to consume her.
There would be casualties. She wept for them now, in the blackness that blanketed her. She wept for the hearts she'd broken, for the lives she'd stolen, for the hearts and lives she knew she'd continue to take for the life she intended to lead. But they wouldn't be for nothing, and she would honor them forever, would remember them forever. This time, she wouldn't forget. But could she ever hope to be forgiven? No… the dank, shriveling cold whispered against her frozen skin. It seeped its answer to her in thin, wailing rivulets into her ears and sang its harsh, shrill refusal into her defiantly beating heart. There was not enough forgiveness in the cruel, wide world to clean the stains of blood from Bo's hands. She was alone, always, forever. No one could ever love a murderer, a thief of souls, a breaker of hearts. She was alone, not even Kenzi could reach her here, would want to fall into the frozen depths of hell to find her. No one would care to forgive a soul that found it so hard to forgive others.
The cold cried out to her, begged her to calm and forget, despite her resolution never to do so. It pushed upon her the memories and dreams it had imposed upon her when she first stepped into her Dawning and searched relentlessly for any crack, any break in the warm armor that enveloped her now from the inside out. It reminded her that she was alone here, that no one would know, no one would care, if she let go. But there was a warmth that permeated the darkness, and the sweet scent of cherries, a smell from her oldest memories and the sweetest parts of her childhood, that crawled through the darkness and crept in tendrils around her…
The scent of cherries flooded Bo's nostrils. The room was awash in light, it streamed through the windows past the old white lace curtains and pooled on the scuffed hardwood floor, onto the old, worn dining table with the faded grain, and dripped from the bookshelves that lined the walls. Family pictures in old, sun-faded wooden frames glittered on every shelf, and a glass bowl of cherries sat invitingly on the table beside her. In front of her was a second bowl, and a third.
Behind her, in the kitchen, Bo could hear the faint sounds of her mother humming an old song, bumping and moving around while she prepared the dough for the pie. It was a sleepy, drowsy afternoon, and Bo felt warm, and comfortable, and happy.
A slow smile wormed its complacent way onto her lips, and she breathed in the tarty sweetness of the cherries beside her. Lazily, she picked a cherry from the bowl and began to pit it. The juice stained her fingers a dark burgundy and splattered her top in little droplets. But she was wearing an apron, so her clothes would stay clean. She pit cherry after cherry, humming along with the tune her mother sang in the kitchen behind her, and licked her fingers clean of the sweet, rich cherry juice every once in a while.
"Bo," a warm, deep voice called. When Bo looked up, her father stood in the doorway. He shed his shoes there, leaning against the doorframe and smiling cheerfully at her. His eyes wrinkled at the corners and the dusting of gray at his temples had spread across his close cropped hair.
"Daddy," Bo smiled back. The cherry juice had sunk deep into the prints of her fingers, she swiped her hands across her apron, and her father fell into the chair opposite hers. "You're home."
"Of course I am, Pumpkin. Your Momma's in the kitchen?" His voice was a low, familiar purr, and his brown eyes smiled kindly at Bo. She nodded in reply, her heart swelled a little at seeing her father. She'd missed him so much. "Can I help?" He asked, and pointed at the forgotten bowl of whole cherries beside her.
Bo hummed her acquiescence and pushed the bowl to the center of the table. Her father immediately reached for one and distractedly began pitting it.
"I missed you, Daddy," Bo mumbled. And then, embarrassed, she busied herself in picking out another cherry to pit – the fattest, darkest one she could find. She slid the bed of her nail into the chosen fruit, slicing the skin open, and deftly scooped the pit out in a practiced, fluid movement.
Her father stopped for a beat. Bo could feel his eyes on hers, feel the weight of his judgment in his stare.
"I missed you too, Pumpkin," he said after a moment. His wrists rested on the edge of the table, his fingers curled relaxed, and dark red juice dripped from them to the worn surface of the table beneath. In the shadows, the cherry juice took on a purple hue, but awash in the light that shafted in sheets through the window, it looked almost like blood. "You've been gone a long time," he went on, before reaching into the bowl for another cherry to pit, "did you come back for the Cherry Festival?"
Startled, Bo gave a slight jerk and looked up at her father. He avoided her eyes, and stared resolutely instead at the cherry he was trying to pit. The Cherry Festival was tomorrow, Bo knew that, but hadn't really given it so much thought.
"I came back to see you, and Mom," she answered hastily, bluntly. The cherry juice on her fingers felt warm, and the last one she'd pitted had left juice dripping from her fingers in fat, shivering droplets to the table beneath. A long moment passed before her father finally looked back at her coolly.
"Yes, you did," he agreed. And then his expression softened and warmed. "Did you visit Kyle?"
A wave of guilt and remorse washed through Bo. She hadn't been to see him yet, and she wasn't sure she would. She had never been to his grave, and wasn't sure she could handle seeing him in a single block of granite stone, with his name and the dates of his birth and death, the death she'd delivered to him, engraved solemnly upon it. Bo shook her head slowly, and picked another cherry from the bowl. It was as fat and juicy and dark as the last. Carefully, she carved through it and expertly pulled its heart out. It wasn't the traditional way of pitting cherries, but in this time and place, it seemed entirely appropriate.
"Maybe you should," her father said carefully, evenly, as if measuring out the exact amount of explosive powder needed for a single, devastating bomb. "He was the reason you left, after all."
Bo didn't answer. She wiped her dripping fingers on the edge of her apron, no longer craving the sweet, dark juice. And then she sat for a moment, with her head bowed, as if in prayer.
When her father spoke again, his voice took on a softness that Bo hadn't heard from him in years.
"Do you remember," he didn't look up from his work, only plucked another cherry to pit; the bowl of cherries was slowly emptying, "that Sunday in church when that dying butterfly came through the window and it landed on your hand and you tried to help it fly and it just couldn't?"
Bo looked up and found her father's dark brown eyes on hers, soft and crinkling around the edges with the sweetness of that memory. She remembered.
"You cried, all day," he said quietly. He dropped his pit into one bowl, and the cherry's meat into the other. "Your mother and I tell each other that story all the time," he paused, took a breath, "you always made everything better."
Bo could hardly believe he remembered that story. She had been so little, everything back then had been so different, so simple.
"Dad, I know you thought that the way you chose to raise me was right," Bo leaned into the table, her words as quiet and delicate as her father's, and soft, so that her mother wouldn't overhear, "I see that now. And when you and Mom screamed and yelled at me like I was evil, it's because you didn't really understand who I was." Bo's father watched her closely while she spoke, listening intently, staring at the little girl that had grown into a woman before his unseeing eyes. "Neither did I," Bo went on, "We were all scared. Yeah, I made mistakes. I still do, a lot of them." Bo stopped again to catch her breath, to catch the slight, uneasy flutter in her chest. It might not be the first time she'd ever said those things, but saying them again, apologizing again, was still scary. "I'm sorry. I am good, you know?"
Bo's father kept staring at her from across the table, and his expression was so impassive that Bo was afraid he hadn't heard her at all, or hadn't cared. Then his face softened again, and the sunlight that poured through the windows lit across his face when he leaned in closer to her, and it looked warm and even loving.
"I know. We all know. People are always just falling in love with you, aren't they?" He said this with no malice, no sarcasm, just kindness and a little innocence. Bo smiled a little at her father. "It was inevitable that Dyson would love you again, wasn't it?"
Bo looked away, then, glanced down at the table, at the faded, worn swirls of grain and the stains the cherry juice had left on it. The wood was a little darker where the placemats usually sat, when her mother wasn't busily making pies or shelling beans or doing her taxes.
"Could I have really known?" She asked so softly, as though asking herself rather than sharing her thoughts rhetorically with her father. She heard him draw in a loud breath through his nose, he shifted in his chair, and Bo looked up at him for guidance and comfort. "Could I have seen it the way I see everyone else's desires? I could have spared him so much pain." It was something that weighed heavily on her heart, something that gnawed at her ever since she'd discovered he'd taken his love back from the Norn.
Her father only looked at her for a minute, contemplated the answer, chewed on it while he chewed his bottom lip and rubbed his thumb to his fingers lightly.
"How could you have spared him pain?" He asked her after a while, his rough voice soft with sympathy and consideration, "would you have left Lauren, to be with him?"
No. Bo knew the answer to that better than she knew almost anything else.
"I love Lauren," she repeated out loud, "only Lauren."
"Then there is nothing you could have done to spare him pain," her father said matter-of-factly. He looked at her squarely, saw the worry and the sadness in her eyes when she looked back at him. "Are you truly willing to be monogamous for this human?" He was genuinely curious, his head cocked at a slight angle and wonder glimmered in his dark eyes, "You, the Succubus, and You, Bo."
Bo pursed her lips a little, her name sounded so strange coming from his mouth, but it was the only one that fit. "Yes," she answered simply. Bo would move the earth for Lauren. Her Succubus nature demanded a sex life too ravenous for one human to sate, but her human nature, the one she had grown up with, demanded a commitment to the woman she loved. She knew it would be a hard road, knew there would be pitfalls, knew that her path, because she was human and because she was Fae, would be unique, and wild, full of danger. She would be navigating blind. But she would trail-blaze. For Lauren, but also for herself. It was who she was, to take the road untraveled. To be monogamous for Lauren was what she wanted – all she wanted – for them. And what she wanted mattered more in this than what she could do. She would shape the world around her to make it possible, if she had to.
Satisfied, perhaps in seeing the determination in his daughter's face, her father leaned back in his chair again and began to suck the stained cherry juice from his fingertips. "Then what about Dyson?" He asked, almost as an afterthought.
Bo considered the layers of his question for a long moment. She had loved Dyson too, once. She still did. She always would. He meant so much to her, was such a vital aspect of who she was and who she'd become, and had been there for her through so much. But she never fought for his love, not the way she wanted to for Lauren's. She never could. And the easy, faithful friendship she had with Dyson now she loved far more than the turbulent, passionate relationship she'd had with him in the past.
"You know, after everything we've been through," she said slowly, softly, "I'm really glad we ended up where we are now." She looked at her father, and though she'd expected to feel uncertain about what she'd said, about how she felt, she wasn't. He smiled at her, and licked the last of the cherry juice from his thumb. The bowl of whole cherries beside him was empty. His last words echoed in the blackness that flooded the room in a crack of lightning and spirited her away again, one last time.
"And what about you?"
Author's Note:
Leader: All but one of these final experiences are going to recall in some way to some previous memory of Bo's. Some are older than others. And yeah, I'd been noticing since pretty much season 2 that Bo is Light Fae in all but name. She rarely works with or for the Dark unless it's necessary, even when she recruited Vex to fight the Garuda, it was because she had to if she hoped to win. Bo's been going through a serious guilt trip, her Dawning has been pushing her to her limits in the hope she'll let go and give up. This is her own soul and subconscious fighting back, so we can hope that every realization she makes is one that strengthens her, both in her struggle to beat her Dawning and in the battle to come. The battle will arrive, soon. Keep in mind, Bo's begun hearing about this battle in her Dawning, and her Dawning occurs over the span of a few hours, in reality.