"Yes, he does. When it really matters it, he does. I'm sure you know that." Angel shook her head - slowly but not rudely. "It's fine, by the way. You can ask. I don't mind."
Evie's eyebrows raised, caught off guard. "Ask what?" Like the sense of it didn't cut things in half by measure, that Evie wasn't prickling and Angel having to tiptoe around why. But she was done with that sort of conversation. She had promised herself that, once Jack had died. She would be as honest and straightforward with the people that mattered as she could be.
"What a noted Templar is doing, carrying an Assassin's child? What are my intentions are with Jacob? I know you know what I am, what I've done, I can only imagine how worried you must be." Just because it wasn't true, didn't mean it wasn't justified. "I've done... Some truly awful things and Jacob rushes in with not enough questions first, some times, especially over a pretty face."
Evie's mouth opened, then closed, in a sharp little click that said it all, really. Angel still had that skill after all, of reading people, picking at their little ticks and nerves, and maybe at another time, another place, she might have pressed on it. But right now, with it acknowledged, she waits.
"What do you want from this?" Evie ventures, at long last, but at least that is honest. Enough that Angel can let her shoulders relax at last.
To one very simple answer: "This. All I want is this."
"This? This house? A baby?" Evie's frown deepens, watching, hovering, hanging on it.
"Maybe that's part of it. But not like that. I want a house where it's a little too cold at night, so I have to curl up against the man I care about very much. I want to worry about my sister in law and her husband, if they've got enough blankets when they come to stay and listen to them complain that the floor boards creak a little loud in their room. I want to buy gifts for the people who work in my house, that pretend they're surprised when they get it, even though they saw me buying them. I want to know, every day, that the world is kinder and more lovely than I was ever allowed to believe. That I can be kind in it."
It must not have been what Evie was expecting to hear, from someone with Angel's reputation, judging by the look on her face. Maybe that was Jacob rubbing off on Angel, she supposes, but it was worth being a little unpredictable just to see the look on people's faces like that.
"That's a very nice sentiment. I have heard you're good at saying those to the right people."
Angel deserved that, and at least enough time passed, that it no longer stung so. "Those kinds of people didn't want my sentiments."
"What do they want?"
"To hear that I find their cock as exciting as they find it, and praise it constantly."
Evie choked, looking absolutely winding, thumping a hand in her chest to cough out the rest of it. "Excuse me?"
"Tell me I'm wrong. All those years hunting Templars here, didn't you see it? Didn't hear it in Starrick's tone? Maybe it's not always their anatomy that they say, but isn't it what they really want to hear anyway?" Angel raised her brows with a look, trying not to laugh.
"I hadn't thought of it like that," Evie was pressing her lips together like she couldn't help it either.
Angel crinkles her eyes in a smile. But it isn't a full one. These days, she had many of them, enough that it feels strange to be off like this. "When I first sent to Jacob, I had been out of the asylum for only a few days that time. They have a new treatment for hysteria. Have you heard of them?"
Evie, silent, watching - waits. Then shakes her head.
"They strap you to a chair, they gag you, tighten it so you cannot thrash too much. Then they lower you backwards into an ice bath. You are left in there, for the count of one minute. It doesn't matter how much you scream at them to stop. They will not. They will this to you over, and over, and over again. I do not know how it is for other women - but the physicians that did it to me, were Templars, and with Jack's instructions, they were... thorough."
The silence went on after she finished speaking, Evie watching her, and Angel running her hands over the bump again. Absent comfort more this time. That was over, Jacob would never send her to such a place. Promised to kill every damn Doctor he knew.
"Before I came to the Rooks, I find it a good way to describe my life. Moments thrust afraid into the cold, before being shut away from sight again, left alone with nothing. I would kill, I'm not pretending about it, then I would be put somewhere far away out of reach. When I protested, if I expressed remorse, Jack would make me pay for it like... that... to remind me what it would be like without him. Would make it so that there was nowhere for me to go. I believed him. I believed in him and that was how life was and he was just doing all of this to protect me. That if anyone but him got the chance, they would kill me. Even when I did realise it was wrong, that I couldn't hurt people like that anymore I still expected..." Angel swallows, her hands knotting up tightly for one moment, white-knuckled, then looser, as she breathed out, forced it away.
"When I met Jacob, that changed. Jacob could have killed me, and what's worse was I was ready to let him. I don't think I even really believed he would listen. I think I just hoped... "
"He'd hear the name and act on it?" Evie finishes, at long last speaking up.
Angel nods, slowly, realising it fully for the first time in years, perhaps, but only now, that she so desperately wanted to live, how little she had wanted to previously. It had not felt like it then. Consumed as she had been, in thwarting Jack, it seemed like just one part of the price to pay in atonement.
"... But he does things. He sees there is a wrong, and he fixes it. Sometimes it's reckless, and it makes me think I'm going grey, but... I don't think I'd change it, not for the world."
Evie's silence this time, was not so sharp, nor calculated. But thoughtful none the less. "You see the best in my brother," she says finally, like delivering a judge's verdict. Whether that was good or bad, Angel could not tell from tone alone. Where Jacob was filled with animation, Evie was ... staid.
"Just like he sees the best in me. Even when no one else would have taken the risk, he didn't kill me. He believed me, and he helped me... understand I could want things, more than just an end to my pain and loneliness. He didn't use me, want me to make the Assassin's weapons, or even wanted to... poach me, so to speak, into bed, to mock the Templars." Her smile is wry, bitter, and far too familiar to the patterns. A look that she gives Evie, that says, she knew well what that felt like.
Evie looked suitable appalled, but Angel continued before letting herself linger to spare any other details. "I don't think he meant to or intended it, but he did, just by being himself with me." and the finality of it, whole and real and true that had become apparent to her, every time she looked at him. "I care about him, in a way I did not know it was possible to care until he let me make the choice to join the Rooks."
It's as far she could put such a thing to words or would be able to venture in. Jacob - he always teased and laughed it away. Acted as if... she had surely been mistaken when she did muddle it out to him. But that was Jacob for you, happy to see the best in everything around him, but she had to nail it into his head sometimes with a hammer to get him to accept he deserved it back. It only made her more resolute to say it to him, as often as it could be allowed.
"I'm glad he has you." Evie's voice is soft, but sure, and finally that bite was taken out of her tone. "I never thought he'd take up this -" she gestured, openly around the room. House, she means, settled family, she steps around.
"He was the one that suggested it. When I was about six months, he realised I was having problems getting in and out of the train. So typically, he just went and fixed it." Which the image of Jacob asking for a loan, from a respectable back, in the name of Sir Jacob Frye, always made Angel laugh. "I am glad he has you too. I was so worried you wouldn't come when I asked him to send for you."
"You sent for me?" that apparently, hadn't been factored in, eyebrows raised.
"I did." That, despite all her cheerfulness up until this point, slips away. Steadying herself. Her hands settled on her stomach. Bracing there in comfort - but in fear, too. "He's going to need you, Miss Evie. He's going to need the one person that understands how scared he is, but who won't make him say it, especially before the end."
That - that was downright alarming, and Evie lent forward, snapped too. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"The same thing that all women have to think about before they go to childbed." She swallows, fixed in it because there was no backing down from this now. She must tell someone, and it could be no one else. That she had to be sure of. "You know what I mean."
The other woman, shifted, her hands settling onto her knees, watching the door, then back to Angel again, who never broke her gaze from her. "You can't be certain of it, no one is." But it hardly could sound completely determined. It was said like the tenuous thing it is.
"I am. I have been for quite some time. I didn't know it. But I do now. I saw it. In the temple I saw down in Cornwall, that belonged to the famous Knights." Angel sighs, brow pinched momentarily. "Did Jacob mention it, when he wrote?"
"He mentioned that you receive... Visions, in your sleep, of a kind." but the question in the words, said to how far that went.
Angel nods in confirmation. "I do. They usually lead to temples, sights, belonging to the first civilisation artefacts. They are often disjointed, confused. It can take me months to even get a hint of where to start."
"He did mention that, yes. But I thought they pertained to just that?"
She hums, softly, puzzling it out. "They did. Or most of the time, do. Until we went to one, and we saw... We saw one of these ancient devices. When I approached, it illuminated... Like it has always been waiting for me? Like it had something to show me? I don't know how to describe how it felt. Always feels. But that'd be closest." Her left hand flexed, the light blue marks were just visible where they wrapped around her fingers, hid under her lace cuff, chosen especially to hide them.
"I don't know what passed outside - Jacob has never told me. I think... I think something took over, for a time. I felt myself speaking, but I wasn't the one talking. I couldn't have been, I could barely form words for the things I saw."
That had Evie's interest, if her lean forward, in a way that was concern certainly, but far more than just that was anything like that. "What? What did you see?"
And for once, for once in such a long time, Angel tried to say what it was exactly she had seen. "Everything. I don't mean that lightly." It shakes, in her voice, tired, so tired, so little in it, but so, so full. "I saw the first beings, rise and fall. I saw the earth change, heat and cool, lava to ice. I saw men, and women, in all the inconsequential natures, kill kings and set fire to cities. Great men gain the world and lose it in one second. To a world filled with light, strange vehicles, technology that could take us to the stars. I saw the moon created out of broken rocks, and I saw mankind walk upon it." It bubbles up, like madness, faster and faster. "I saw us. I saw you and Jacob as children, I saw how different and how much the same you are to Ezio, Altair, Achilles, as children just the same, carried inside of each of us. The Assassins, the Templars, how stupid and little and important we all are. I saw it all, Evie. I saw this."
It chokes out of her, it makes her weep, it had made her weep every time she thought of it all. Not because of grief, for it was far too much to grieve over. But simply to be filled with so much, that it must go somewhere to help her understand it, for her body, her mind, was all that she had to do it. Little as she could each time she went back to it. As if her body must react to so much some how, and tears helped work her through.
"And that's how you know you'll...?"
"Yes. But... I don't know. It wasn't clear. I thought what I saw might have been your mother. But then Jacob bought this house, the room was -" The same, and she clears her throat to carry on as she ever did. "I don't know exactly what will pass, but I know, it won't be easy and I knew, that whatever is coming... He was going to need you by his side for it if there is going to be any hope for it all."
When the silence fell this time, it was much longer, far deeper. Angel, in her own thoughts, and Evie, at a loss, it seemed for the inevitable fate most women faced. How much knowing so much changed everything, and yet, how nothing changed at all. "Is there... Anything I can do, for you?"
That - that Angel did not expect. Clear on her face she had done what she usually did. Spent so long, worrying, planning, meticulously moving things around for the people she cared about, that what was left for her in all that? What would give her comfort? She hardly knew. She had already done... everything practical that mattered. Organised the midwife for Jacob to call on. The Doctor for Molly to get afterwards. All her instructions that she had couched in her worrying without ever letting on what else she knew.
"... I could not... Ask for anything much else, Miss Evie. But... after everything I have done, I find it hard to speak to Him, anymore." Her eyes lower, watching the carpet rather than looking at the Assassin's face. "... perhaps if you could say a prayer, on my behalf, I would be... very glad." It's shy, half spoken in a murmur. The sort of thing she tried never to bring up or speak of, most times. It meant too much for that.
It, perhaps, was not much to ask for. But when Evie reached over and snagged their fingers together in a sure grip, it meant the world. Holding fast, their gazes meeting evenly, with one firm affirmation. "I will, Miss Angel."
And when they smiled, this time, it was far more earnest, the tension, finally, finally easing out of the room.
Enough that when Henry poked his head in from finally unpacking, to say that it was all settled, Jacob, in turn, followed not so long later, they were talking quite evenly over tea, like all the tension had been nothing much at all.
Though neither Henry nor Jacob quite knew what to make of it when Angel slid her eyes across, to Evie with a smile so innocent butter wouldn't melt in her mouth as she gives her a knowing look. "I didn't have to lie to Jacob about it though, he knows it's quite my favourite."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
pt two. }