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English
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Part 21 of The Journal-Keeper , Part 1 of The Time Between , Part 17 of The Director
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Published:
2017-07-11
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2017-07-13
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2,363
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6/6
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Clean

Summary:

Sometimes cleaning is the only way to cope.

Notes:

Sooooo, after episode 67, I'm at least temporarily ditching my idea for a post-canon chapter. Might come back to the idea someday, because it was pretty cute, but I'm not feeling it now.

Chapter 1: Year Zero

Chapter Text

It’s just a two-month sublet , says Lucretia to her empty apartment, and you’re already ready for Jerry to take it over: stop fretting . But she just wants to clean it one more time. Just for something to do, because tomorrow is the big day and she can’t sleep, even after staying out late with the rest of the team. Maybe she should’ve had a few drinks instead of just writing.

She makes herself a snack, nervously eating a tiny bowl of yogurt with granola, and then washes the bowl and the spoon. She makes sure all the dishes are stacked neatly in the cupboard. She wipes down the cupboard doors and the countertop. She tries to go to sleep.

When she can’t, she gets up and scrubs the bathroom before taking a shower. She fluffs and refolds the towels, hangs the throw rug to dry, and wipes down the mirror and the counter. She tries again to go to sleep.

She dozes unevenly until just before sunrise, then tosses and turns until she decides it’s pointless to keep trying. She makes the bed, wipes non-existent dust from the bedside table closes the closet on the clothes she’s not taking, the boxes of journals going all the way back to her early childhood. She triple-checks the last duffel of clothes she’ll be taking onto the Starblaster. She’s got everything now. There’s really nothing left to clean.

She locks the door and leaves the key under the mat.

It’s just two months, she thinks. Hopefully Jerry won’t make a total mess of it.

Chapter 2: Spores

Summary:

Cleaning the ship after Magnus dies on the mushroom world.

Chapter Text

They get back from the mission to collect the Light, and Lucretia is sick of mushrooms, sick of spores, sick of worrying about the fungus everywhere and in everything. They left Magnus’ body, because it’s just a body, he’s going to reform on that exact same spot on the ship with that damn black eye, might as well let the mushrooms have him.

Once inside the ship, she strips off everything except the mask and showers for what feels like days. When she closes her eyes, she sees two things, interchangeably: the dessicated mushroom people bowing over the light, and Magnus’ face, gone grey and gaunt. She scrubs every inch of skin; she scrubs the mask; she scrubs the shower itself, rinsing all the particles of fungus as far away from her as she can.

After, she washes all of her clothes, even the ones that never left the ship. She washes all of their clothes, walking from one room to another with a basket, holding it out wordlessly. Barry nods in acknowledgement before tossing in a pile of jeans. Lup helps her gather the clothes flung about Taako’s room. Davenport gives her a worried look, but doesn’t say anything as she takes away anything he isn’t wearing. She washes Magnus’ clothes without telling anyone. She folds and stacks the clothes in his room when she’s done; it feels maybe a little too intimate. She lingers longer than she needs to.

“The kitchen’s perfectly clean, bubeleh,” says Taako, as she wipes down the countertops with the strongest cleanser she can find. “Besides, that’s what Prestidigitation is for, am I right? Burn a spell slot? Live a little?”

She finds she can’t answer through the haze, and when the countertops are clean enough for her, she gets a bucket and starts mopping the floor. Who knows how many spores could get tracked in? It needs to be cleaned, it should have been cleaned already.

“Lucy, you can’t clean him back to life,” he says. “He’s gonna come back, it’s gonna be ok. You gotta shake out of this.”

“I didn’t know… I didn’t think I felt….”

“Hoo boy. I catch your drift.” He picks up a rag and joins her.

“Hard candy! Who dies for hard candy?” she asks, not really to Taako so much as around him.

Almost in unison they say, “Magnus Fucking Burnsides.”

Chapter 3: No Longer Alone

Notes:

Set after Lucretia's cycle alone.

Chapter Text

Everyone is asleep in an enormous cuddling pile, which is great, except that Lucretia startles awake in the darkness and is instantly on alert for the sounds of people trying to attack or board the ship. The tangle of arms and legs is comforting, except when it’s oddly smothering, and she’s twitchy, waiting for something to happen. A long time passes, and nothing happens. Lup twitches, and Taako mumbles in response. Barry snores. Magnus shifts from his side to his back.

She slides out from the pile, pulls on some clothes from the floor: might be Lup’s pants, might be Magnus’ shirt. It’s pretty dark. And she leaves the big comfy bed for the cool hallways of the Starblaster. She does what she’s been doing for almost a year, going down to look at the Bond Engine before she does anything else.

Davenport has beaten her there. He’s not doing anything. His hands are clasped behind his back, and he’s just watching, just looking at her handiwork. He tilts his head to look up at her, but she’s on autopilot, checking all the connections, reviewing all the displays, wiping down every surface.

“You did good, Lucretia,” he says, and she looks at him, but she doesn’t see him at first, not really. Then she looks around at the engine room, the only part of the whole ship that is really clean. Every day for a year she did this.

“Yeah, I did all right,” she says.

They spend the rest of the morning walking the decks together, and now she can tell him what happened, all the work she did to keep the ship running. She shows him the repairs, the half-assed ones that were good enough, and the ones she put real work into, because she was pretty sure they were holding the ship together. He runs his hands over the seams, touching the skin of the ship like it’s his own child. As they go, she tidies up without really looking, picking up tools and supplies and tucking them away into drawers and shelves.

They spend the whole morning together, Lucretia and Davenport, until the rest of the crew stumbles awake and finds them at the wheel, everything around them neat as a pin, the two of them just quietly looking off into the void together.

Chapter 4: Not Quite Alone

Notes:

After the events of episode 66.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

After depositing her friends (her former friends?) in their new lives, Lucretia decides to give herself a week to wallow in stupid, pointless feelings. What’s another week, after a hundred years? She can start the plan in earnest in a week, certainly.

And so she drifts about the halls of the Starblaster after returning from the surface of Faerun. She eats only occasionally, fitfully, whatever she can put in her mouth that was left behind by the others. She thinks maybe she’s forgotten how to cook. She thinks maybe she doesn’t want to relearn.

She sleeps too much, and rarely in her own bed. Too often, she goes back to Magnus’ bed and tries to think of happier times, tries to imagine some future happiness, tries to forget the anguished “no”. She wallows in the smell of him on the sheets, the smell of his clothes.

Sometimes she just falls asleep on the couch, when she can’t stand the contents of her head. She’s dozing fitfully like that when he wakes her. Without noticing, she’s let a week stretch into two, almost three.

“Davenport?”

She hasn’t yet gotten to the point where that doesn’t make her heart freeze, hearing him say his name as if he meant to say something else. She winces as she sits upright, and he puts his hand on hers.

“Davenport.”

She sinks into her chest, but he won’t leave her alone with her thoughts. He tugs on her hand until she gets up. She looks around the common room. It smells musty. She smells musty, tired and yet overslept.

He brings her a glass of water. She drinks it all at once without stopping. She rolls up the sleeves of Magnus’ shirt, far too big for her but she’s not ready to take it off just yet, and she runs hot water, finds the soap, the sponges, the mop, sets out all the supplies and just starts. Because she’s still not ready, she’s still caught in the netherworld of regret and doubt, but it’s time to put one foot in front of the other.

“Davenport Davenport.”

“Thank you, I needed that.”

“Davenport.”

Notes:

Hey, let's lean even further into some Davenport-based dramatic irony, shall we?

Chapter 5: Welcome to the Moon

Summary:

It's time for the Bureau of Balance! Set during the Gerblins arc, ending right at the beginning of episode 7.

Chapter Text

The gnome Craig has Gundren’s advertisement. Killian’s been sent planetside to track down Brian. Nearly everything is in place. The Director informs her staff that she will be deep in research; all questions and requests may be given to Davenport, who has strict instructions to leave them on her desk.

Time to go into her private rooms, then; time to face the last tasks.

She’s spent every night for the last month reading the second set of journals, the ones she didn’t feed to Fischer, redacting again even more carefully, almost the same as before, just hiding a little less, just enough.

It’s not a good feeling, really: brings back the worst times in exhaustingly stark relief. On the other hand, there were some good times, weren’t there? Either way, it’s the thing that has to be done, and Lucretia always does better if there’s a clear path forward.

In the center of the floor, then: big boxes with books of nearly every size and shape spilling out of them. It’s more mess than she prefers, but there’s really no other way around it. There’s another box, full of old clothes and mementos, but that one stays closed and unexamined for sure. The tank is already in the corner, with the baby voidfish floating gently inside. She drank its ichor right away, and she’s been feeding it with little snacks of old doodles, give it a little something to grow on.

She hesitates for a long time, once she’s shut herself up back here. She procrastinates with other tidying: the map, for one, could be pinned more neatly. Her private notes, those could get straightened up. It takes a while to create all the magical wards she’ll need to give her warning, should anyone penetrate this room, and then to test them in silent mode. Holy symbols, too, just in case Barry turns up again like a bad penny to trip up the plan. She laughs a bit at her own mangled metaphors.

Until eventually she’s down to completely unnecessary details: wiping down the baby’s tank, refilling her inkwells, straightening the stacks of empty journals.

“All right, kiddo,” she says. She hasn’t had the heart to give it a name. “Are we ready for this?”

She drops in the first journal. No lights flicker now; these memories are ones that no one now alive holds anyway, other than her. This is the backup, this is what lets them come back and know but not know. The voidfish waves its tentacles at her after it feeds, and she drops in another, and another, until the boxes on the floor are empty.

Moments after she returns to her office, there’s a knock on the door. Davenport enters, followed by the orc woman Killian.

“Ma’am, Director, you asked to be notified if that adventuring party showed up at Brian’s hideout? Well, they’re here now. Like here on the moon?”

“Excellent, thank you.”

“Are you sure about these guys? They seem kinda...reckless?”

“Did they retrieve the relic?”

“Uh, yeah, actually.”

“There you are, then. Go ahead and send them down to be inoculated. And thank you for your excellent work.”

Time to find out if the plan worked, then. About fucking time.

Chapter 6: Waiting for a Bell

Summary:

After Barry has the boys smash their stones of farspeech, and before they return with mannikin Magnus.

Chapter Text

“You haven’t heard anything yet ma’am?” Angus grips his fancy hat in one hand and the still-silent stone of farspeech in the other. There are dark circles under his eyes -- it’s a bit like looking into a mirror.

“No news yet. Did you sleep at all, dear?”

He shakes his head.

“I’m sorry to say not, ma’am.” His nose scrunches up. “If I might make an observation, I don’t think you have either.”

He looks around her office, not the Director’s secret office, but her ordinary office, the one they spent all yesterday sitting in together, waiting to hear from the boys.

“Are you...reorganizing?”

“Just a little tidying.”

In truth, there are books removed from the shelves and stacked on every horizontal surface. At some unholy hour of the morning, she had thought of a new way of organizing her little office library. But halfway through, she realized that what she really needed to do was clean all the knickknacks, so that’s what she’s doing. Wiping down something -- she looks down at it, a strange little conglomeration of shells, 80 years old -- and then she sets it down.

What is all of this stuff? Why is she sorting and cleaning it? She looks at the staff, leaning in the corner, its faint hum always with her, that feeling of protection….

Lucretia puts her head in her hand.

“I should’ve gotten a little sleep,” she mumbles.

“Here, let me help you,” says Angus, and he starts putting books on the shelves. She puts the trinkets back, too, and answers his questions when he asks which book goes where.

“Do you think they’ll be back soon, ma’am?” he asks, finally, when almost everything is back in place.

She shakes her head.

“I think so, but I don’t know. Hunting relics is a dangerous business.”

“Ma’am, what happens to the magic? You know, when the relics get destroyed?”

She blanches, and freezes, and racks her brain. Angus McDonald is a ten-year-old boy, but he is still the World’s Greatest Detective. Why doesn’t she have an answer? She needs an answer.

And then the sound of footsteps running towards them.

“They’re back. The reclaimers have come back!”

She grabs her staff and runs out into the main hall.

“Davenport, get the ball, go meet them, now!”

“Madame Director, Magnus…. Magnus didn’t make it.”

She grips the staff tighter, and for a second everything spins. She focuses on her staff, her staff and the ball and the last part of the plan.

“Davenport, go get the relic.”