Tobin barked a laugh. "Your friend. Right. And I’m the Primordial Villain." He gave Lucille a wink. "Sister, maybe. What’s your name, gorgeous?"
Lucille set her teacup down on its saucer without a sound.
"I’d suggest you remove your hand from her," she said pleasantly.
"Or what?" And to the great misfortune of everyone who shared his blood, Tobin’s hand stayed exactly where it was, and his grin came back around to Mavena. "She always this..."
Lucille moved.
Mavena would spend a long time afterwards trying to reconstruct the order of it.
Her mother’s hand closed over the wrist on her shoulder. Then the wrist was no longer on her shoulder, and Tobin was bent over the table, cheek pressed to the wood, arm folded up behind his back at an angle arms were not issued with. None of it had made any noise except the soft clink of the sugar bowl.
"GH... AGH! LET, agh, LET GO..."
"Shhh. You’ll wake the street." Lucille wasn’t holding him down so much as resting her hand on the arrangement, the way you’d keep a page from turning in a breeze.
Her voice stayed exactly where it had been all evening, warm and light and maternal. "A woman tells you no eleven times and you barge into her home nonetheless... Isn’t that a terrible crime?"
"I didn’t, AH, I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know..."
"Know what? That forcing yourself upon others is bad?" A gentle tut.
Then the weight on his arm was gone. Tobin ran. Or tried to.
He made it two whole steps, long enough to taste escape, before a hand closed around the back of his collar and the whole slab of him stopped mid-stride, boots still walking the air.
Lucille turned him around, gently, almost politely, so he could see it ing.
"Wha..."
Her fist crossed the distance with a sound like a barrel lid slamming, wet at the center where his nose gave up its original shape, and Tobin left her grip sideways, took a table’s corner on the way down, and spread himself over the floorboards. A tooth skittered away under a chair and came to rest against the wall, where it stayed.
He was asleep before the blood reached his lip.
Lucille looked down at him and shook the impact off her knuckles once, and when she spoke, the warmth was gone from her voice.
"Instead of doing what I truly want, I’ll hand you to Jasmine’s people. They’ll decide your punishment." She straightened her sleeve. "But you’ll never get to even think about hurting my Mavena again."
Silence owned the taproom.
Behind the counter, Robert rose into view by degrees, hands braced on the wood as though the floor had tilted, and Mavena hadn’t moved at all.
They had both known, in the abstract way you know the ocean is deep, that Lucille carried a class and stats now, that she fought monsters at the villain’s side.
But the slim wrists with flour under their nails had kneaded dough, hung laundry, shooed cats off the pantry shelf, and they had just caught, folded, and switched off a man twice her weight without her breath changing. There was nowhere in either of their heads to put it.
"...Goddess above," Cela whispered beside him.
The kitchen door chose that moment to fail entirely as a sound barrier. From behind it came a deep chuckle, followed by a thud that might have been a king’s forehead meeting a shelf in the dark, followed by Iris’s agitated voice hissing at Quinlan to put her down.
Mavena noticed none of them.
"Mom." Her voice came out small, and it hadn’t been small in years. "Since when can you DO that?"
And Lucille did the thing she had done on every visit.
Mavena watched it happen without knowing what she was watching: her mother’s shoulders rounding by a degree, her hands finding her apron even though she wasn’t wearing one, her whole self folding down into something smaller and softer and easier to sit across a teacup from.
The humble mother, reassembled between one breath and the next.
"Oh, that was nothing, sweetheart," Lucille said, light as flour.
"Don’t do that."
Quinlan’s voice arrived from the kitchen doorway, with weight instead of volume, and every head in the room turned. The amusement was gone from his face, replaced by a fondness that had iron in it.
"You’re an almighty warrior who happens to be a loving, caring mother. Why must you hide a side of yourself?"
"> "Quin..." Lucille spoke with immense worry and anxiety in her tone.
">
Lucille protested."> Lucille protested.
Quinlan relented. "> Quinlan relented.
"> The Bloodmonger bit her lip.
Before she could say more, Mavena was out of her chair and in front of Quinlan, and the knot that had been pulling tighter all evening had slipped loose without her permission.
"Can you tell me more about my mother?! I want to hear... From your point of view, not hers. She keeps downplaying everything..." She sent her mother a strongly disapproving look. "So annoying!"
Quinlan observed Mavena for a moment, then turned toward his lover, waiting.
"..." Lucille’s fists clenched white at her sides.
"No, I’m sorry. I can’t." Quinlan shook his head at Mavena, gentle about it. "Those stories belong to your mother. If she wants them to stay buried, then buried they-"
"O-okay. Okay!"
The words burst out of Lucille before he could finish.
For months she had folded the warrior away with the linens, dreading the day her daughter would see the monster before the mother.
And now that the day had e, her daughter was leaning over the table and asking for more of her, asking for the exact half she’d spent every visit hiding.
Her fists loosened, finger by finger. The hope that crept onto her face was so raw it hurt to look at.
"Quin, please... Tell my daughter whatever you think is best."
"Alright," he nodded, smiling, and took Lucille’s hand in his and squeezed.
Then, he faced Mavena.
"Your mother," he said, "is one of the most badass existences to have ever graced this world. What you saw tonight was her being polite."
"But..." His grin spread, proud and vicious. "I’m afraid mere words will never do her justice."
He raised his free hand, palm up.
Water rose out of the air above it, spinning itself into a figure no taller than a wine bottle: a slim woman in translucent detail, long hair, a large axe in one small liquid fist. The figure rolled its shoulders exactly the way Lucille rolled hers.
"Your mother struggled a lot to acclimate to bat, mostly because of her class’s quirks. For months, she kept our healer busier than the rest of us bined."
"..." Lucille’s cheeks went pink at that, memories resurfacing of how many times Sera told her off for being a reckless battle maniac.
"But little by little, she transformed herself. And now..." Quinlan continued, "She’s menace itself."
Threads of magma lit around the water figure, hissing.
Mavena pletely forgot she was supposed to be angry.
She was leaning in before she knew she’d moved, elbows on the table, chin dropping into her hands, and her eyes caught the magma light and kept it.
Wide, bright, mesmerized, the eyes of the little girl who used to beg for one more story before bed, aimed at the tiny, fearless figure standing calm in the middle of the fire.
Her mother.
That was her mother.
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