“Have you ever looked into theodicy, Lucas?” (The crack in her voice is expected to be ignored.) It’s a hell of a pivot and a million-dollar word when Jack’s normally armed with a handful of loose change. Further, there’s a phonetic component at play here, which she realizes belatedly and clarifies: “the Biblical shit. Not the boring book.”

Jack genuinely doesn’t know it’s actually a poem.

"Once or twice," he says quietly. It's hard not to, in the kind of life they lead. It's just a matter of stop asking, don't stray. Listen. Perpetuate. Keep marching, soldier, because you have to and the world falls in your hesitation.

And how has that been working so far?
Universe: 1, Hathorne: 0.

"Hard to think any of this is ever wholly worth it sometimes." Which is traitorous out of his mouth, but he's drunk, and he's sad, and those make for hell of a good oil to the fire.

"I never would have brought him to a hunt."

But it's too late for that excuse, isn't it?

"Guess that doesn't matter much now though, doesn't it?" Because whatever happens, he knows how this goes. The barest idea that Sascha is still out there means the Society at his back, and Reid's, and he doesn't think he can afford to pull the trigger twice ( and yet, it's always him who comes out on top, of course it is—the one left standing, the one who survives, same story in a different skin ). So Lucas chokes back a grim, humorless laugh as he raises the bottle on hand again, lifting it to his lips for another bitter swig. It burns but he's accustomed to the feeling.

"It should have been me."

Her lips purse, throughout Iain's speech. An easy dismantling of most of the arguments she'd built up, despite everything. She recognizes the flaws to the system she'd set in place for herself; an ideology that demands more than it gives, an entirely separated kind of path that never makes for easy welcoming. And yet here they are, and a reality rarely spoken of confirmed in the space of a breath, and though Cecilia can't bring herself to waver, she does blink at the admission. Someone brought out of orbit, the equation temporarily upended, for someone who'd built an entire life out of depending on the systemic and the predicted.

( He always did seem to have that certain effect on her. )

"That I'm doing something significant," is the response that comes to mind, her head raised to meet his gaze; a flash of gunpowder, defiance against the world at large. Because it's true and because she's spent all her life chasing after that kind of proof, damn anything else. A matriarch had said she was not a hero; she's right, to some degree. Cecilia had never really been grasping for a title, or the claim. A moral compass and the refusal to take inaction made for a certain kind of belief system, much more when hers had been the affecting party. ( It hadn't been so much as saving someone, as it had been not letting bygones be bygones. )

She does not apologize for it. Cecilia doesn't think she knows how to exist without that drive. ( It's all she's really known. ) "That regardless of whatever danger, I'm the one in control." That anything that becomes of her had been on her terms and hers alone. She's not willing to have anyone else decide that, history or otherwise. ( She's not willing to have her entire existence shaped for someone else's narrative—an unimportant, arbitrary legacy that's not hers at all.

Dad always did say she'd have to fight tooth, claw, and nail to be seen as she is.

He wasn't wrong. )