She has lived in nicer places than this tiny apartment. Centuries and millennia ago, she had been someone great, someone powerful, a woman that had held the fate of millions in her hand. Had they succeeded in finding a way to stop the solar flares then, Juno would have gone on to be famous, rich, respected even. But they had failed, and so she had been left alone to suffer through century after century of sheer stupidity from humans as they struggled to understand the most basic properties of the natural world.
There have been times when she swore the wait would never end, and she would be trapped in her self-made tomb forever, until even the humans had gone from the planet and she was left alone to wait for the end of days. And there had been days when she thought that would be preferable to listening to the mindless drivel of their thoughts filter through her mind.
But now that she's free, everything is different. This is her second chance, to do more- to become more than she would have in her own time. She will rule this world, and in time she will rule more. For now, these are distant plans, far from completion, and Juno has become a very patient woman. She is happy to wait, to let the world spin on without her intervention, knowing that her enemies do her work for her even as she waits.
And there are other distractions at the moment, anyway.
John groans under her, nearly drowning out the rattle and thuds of the cheap wooden bedframe that barely manages to support their combined weight. He's panting, the exhaustion of his human body fights against the hungry desire of his inherited desire. John is not the husband Juno watched die (a very long time ago now), merely an echo or a cheaply made substitute. Sometimes this makes her hate him more than any other human in the world, for daring to pretend to be someone he's not. Someone better than he could even imagine.
And then there are times, like now, when he shuts his mouth and drops his pants, when an echo is good enough. Then again, she's been on her own a very long time. Nearly anything warm and breathing would be good enough.
Juno could have kept going, could have kept exploring every inch of the man's body until she knows it as well as her own. But John looks like he's liable to collapse from exhaustion in another second, so Juno gasps in one last moment of ecstasy and rolls off him, breathing more heavily than usual.
For a while they lay in sweat soaked silence, lost in their own thoughts, and then finally John speaks. "What happens next?" he asks, voice deferential in a way she only ever hears when he speaks to her.
"I still have much to teach you," Juno says, without taking her eyes off the water stained ceiling overhead. "When you are rested, we will continue."
"I didn't mean- ah-" John licks his lips and shifts next to her on the tiny, creaking bed. Obviously, her words have distracted him. "I didn't mean right here," he goes on. "I meant the big picture."
"I know what you meant," Juno says. "But the answer is simple. We wait."
"Wait?" John repeats. "For what? For those men to come after us? For the girl to escape?"
Juno only laughs. The man has no idea who it is they're hunting, or what their true goal is. He knows only that they have enemies, and nothing more about them. As he should. With any luck, he'll never learn- if he ever finds out what she has planned for him she'll gain another enemy, and this is one with enough borrowed knowledge to possibly pose a threat. "They mean nothing," she says dismissively. "Although the girl…" Minerva, she would very much like to see again. Her death is long overdue, and Juno deserves to be the one who delivers it. "The girl we should find."
"So we let them do whatever they want?" John demands.
"We know who they are, we know where they are, and we know what they want," Juno says. "That makes them easy to manipulate."
"You know all that," John says, a hint of anger creeping into his voice. "You never tell me anything."
"Because you don't yet need to know, beloved," Juno says, and watches him relax a little at the false tenderness in which she cloaks her word. "But if it will make you happy, I will tell you that what they desire most is my death." He sucks in a breath, and she smiles. "Which is why we will give it to them."
-/-
It's not (quite) that simple, of course. Juno has no intention of simply throwing her life away after everything she's done to survive, but it's important that her enemies believe her dead. And better still that they believe themselves responsible, that they grow lazy and arrogant in their imagined success. Only then will Juno be given the time and space she needs to plan her true victory.
"I don't like this," John says when they finally drag themselves out of bed and begin finalizing their plans. "It's dangerous- there's too much chance of something going wrong."
"It must be dangerous," Juno snaps. "We do not pit ourselves against fools, and they will know if there is no real danger."
"But that-"
"Will work," Juno insists.
"You're planning to drive a car into a lake," John says flatly. It's a far less impressive version of the plan than the one she'd outlined to him earlier. "So that they'll assume you drowned and will leave you alone long enough to finish whatever your plan is. The one you still won't tell me about."
"Exactly," Juno says.
"What if you actually do drown?" John demands. "What happens to your precious plan then?"
"I told you," Juno says. "There must be a real element of danger. They have already tried to run us off the road once. This time, they will succeed." It's not a complicated plan, but these are men that live and breathe complicated plans. They have been trained to do so, not only by long lives spent as assassins, but also by the lies that time travel makes necessary. They will expect her to come at them with the strongest weapons in her arsenal, and so of course she will do no such thing.
She will simply allow them to learn where she is hiding, and then lead them on a merry chase until they reach just the right bend in the road. And then, the false loss of control, the crash, the fall into the river. A fall no human would be able to survive, and in fact Juno has chosen this particular stretch of road because of the many that have died there in the past. But she is not human, no matter what form she may be in at the moment. She will survive, and she will do so in secret.
She will win.
"You will not be there," Juno informs John, when he looks ready to argue again. "You are only human, and would not survive." Not that she expects him to live to see the end of all this, but she expects he will still be useful in the future.
"Then where will I be?" John asks, and there's a note of bitter hurt in his voice that for a moment gives Juno pause. This man is not perfect, he is not the man she wants or remembers, but he loves her in his own twisted way, and resembles Aita enough for that to matter.
"Look for the girl," Juno says, voice softer than it has been. "Minerva."
"Why do you care so much about her?" John asks, and he sounds less angry and petulant than he has up until now. "She's just some kid, isn't she?"
Juno only shakes her head. "Find her," she repeats. "That's all that matters."
But John isn't willing to let the issue go. "Is she one of your mysterious enemies?" he asks. "The ones I'm not allowed to know about?"
"It's for your own good that you never know them," Juno says. She's not completely sure if the assassins know about John, but if they don't now, they certainly would as soon as he learned who they are. Whatever John's talents may be, and he does have some, subtlety is absolutely not among them. "And Minerva is… no longer an enemy." Not now that she's been reduced to a child, helpless and stupid and nearly human. "But I have questions that need answering."
Not that she expects Minerva will be in any state to answer. The reincarnation process had been interrupted when Minerva went through it, and Juno knows all too well what affect that can have on the mind. She'd spent thousands of years dwelling on what her own fate would be if anything went wrong when the day finally came for her own return. The list of horrible side effects is long, but uniformly depressing.
John nods, hesitant but obedient. "I'll bring her to you," he says.
-/-
The day Juno has planned for her accident dawns dreary and rainy, exactly perfect for her needs. Her enemy remains scattered and separated, but she only needs to lure one of them in. She picks the oldest one, Altair, because he is the one the others trust the most, and she knows they will not doubt his word if he is convinced she is dead.
He is alone, when Juno tracks him down. It's not hard- the man can run and hide as much as he wants to, but Juno has senses that go beyond the merely human. His life and his body have been so twisted by her own intervention and Minerva's that he pulses like a homing beacon on the edge of Juno's consciousness as soon as she chooses to look. She's there waiting when he turns a corner in the middle of a nearly deserted neighborhood, and she's laughing when he looks up and makes eye contact with her. She's already running by the time he gets over his initial shock and comes charging after her.
She can feel every footstep behind her, driving into her skull like a drumbeat. Strong. Steady. Determined. Driven by the certain knowledge that he will catch her because he has no other choice. And this is the other reason she'd decided to come to him rather than any of the others. She'd seen him, at the temple. Upset and mourning in that terribly emotional way humans had. The boy she'd destroyed to come back had meant something to Altair. He has no intention of letting her escape alive.
And then they're driving. Juno is not a skilled driver, but she doesn't have to be for this task. If anything, her clumsy attempts at escaping will convince him the crash is nothing but accidental. Her heart is in her throat and Juno laughs at the thrill of adrenaline rushing through her. This- this is what it means to really be alive. She's on the edge of life and death, very nearly but never quite out of control. And suddenly, she sees it.
She makes a sudden, sharp turn to the left, plowing straight into the metal guard rail that separates the road from the river below. She crashes through with a screaming sound of bending, breaking metal, and the whole world seems to go into slow motion as she falls. The world goes silent, and the only thing Juno can hear is her own breathe. The fall seems to last forever, and then she takes one last, long breath in, and the car hits the water with a splash like a cannonball.
Juno opens her eyes, watching through the window until finally the car hits the muddy bottom of the river. Then she counts to thirty, and forces the door open. Under normal circumstances, a difficult or impossible feat. But Juno is stronger than any mere human, and she'd known this was coming. She has tools ready, and she knows to keep calm.
She stays underwater until she judges herself far enough from Altair that he won't be able to see her surface, and then comes up for air. The first breath is sweet, and she breathes deeply, panting after her lengthy swim. She laughs, and runs her hands through her soaking wet hair. The unfortunate part of being too far away for Altair to see her is that she can't see him, either. But she can imagine the scene playing out near the crash site, as he studies the river, and realizes it would be a miracle if anyone were to survive.
And he's right. Juno's survival is a miracle. One of her own making, and she feels powerful and triumphant as she starts the long walk back to the tiny, shitty apartment she's forced to call home. For now. Because now that she has the space and the time to see her plans through to completion, there's nothing to stop her from doing whatever she wants.
Juno has had a lot of time to think about what exactly it is that she wants. Over the centuries, she's figured it out, honed her desires until they are rock hard certainties inside her mind, a determination to see this through to the bitter end. And it all comes down to time.
She is going to reverse it. Time. Undo the centuries of harm that humans have done to the planet, and bring her own society back. And everyone that's hurt her, the assassins that hunt her now, they will be the ones to suffer in her brave new world. When her people return from the past to rule the world again, Juno will be queen. And the humans- those she allows to survive- will be her willing slaves.
But there is a lot of work to be done before that can happen. Luckily, Juno has had a very long time to plan out exactly how to make that happen. "Fuck you," she whispers, in the general direction of where Altair must still be standing. Then she turns her back and leaves, mind already running on toward her next obstacle.
-/-
I'm really sorry for the flood of new fics and chapters recently. I just started winter break (five weeks with no class! Woo hoo!) and suddenly I have all this free time I don't know what to do with! Sorry, again.