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this empty northern hemisphere

Summary:

There’s something foolish about this, praying to a god that always abandoned her. A lord who has constantly forsaken her and done nothing as Lilith lost everything and everyone she’d ever cared about. She clears her throat, clasps her hands, and waits, wondering if she’s even going through the motions right.

Notes:

please enjoy my broken broken brain and its terrible thoughts

Work Text:

She’s changed, Lilith realises a bit too late. Her last memory of Zelda was a quiet girl in the academy, hiding behind her brothers robes as they walked from class to class. She remembers that Zelda so well, so soft and quiet and powerful, the first witch among the Coven to be able to call upon magic without the use of a wand or a staff or a crystal. When Zelda was younger she had this quiet, eerie sense of power to her, she could command the room with a soft spoken word. Now Zelda was tired, older, time etched onto a weary face like the scars across Lilith’s back. She has a strength to her now, unspoken and all-seeing and the feeling Lilith has when she sees her is reminiscent of being punched in the gut. 

There’s one problem to all of this, one sense of regret nagging in the back of Lilith’s mind that she tries too hard to swallow. 

Zelda died years ago on a stone slab when she siphoned the void out of of Sabrina and took her place as the vessel. 

There’s a ghost in front of Lilith now, and she doesn’t know how to feel. 

 

-

 

With all bridges burned, once, over half a century after they last spoke, Lilith hunts down Faustus. He had known her, the shocked, angry girl, the sorceress in training. Faustus had known all her helplessness, all her hunger, all the thorns in her brain. 

She smiles at him, only for a moment. Even before he denies her, even before he turns away, she already feels empty.

“There’s no cure for death, Lilith. Not one the Cain Pit will not solve.”

She had chosen this, all of this. And she would not wish herself back in that garden, knowing nothing but pain, loneliness, and helplessness. But she wishes that the other choices offered, all those years ago, had gone differently. Maybe, if they had, Lilith wouldn’t be here.

Maybe, if they had, she’s be curled up in the Mortuary with her hand on Zelda’s hip forgetting every single thing that had ever happened. 

Lilith sits down at the bar in the expensive hotel and orders a scotch. It leaves a burn in her throat that reminds her so much of nicotine and cloves and the sweet taste of Zelda. 

 

-

 

Lilith is dreaming of the past again. She doesn’t feel anything, not the needle through her skin, or the whiskey Ambrose set beside her burning her throat, and for a moment every excruciating minute of pain from before is overshadowed as a blunt knife carves out her heart. 

She had not wanted to die before, but she had made her peace with it. She survived everything with Zelda at her side. She cannot imagine surviving this. 

Loss is an old enemy nipping at her heels and she cannot stand the thought of someone dictating the boundaries of her grief. She’s been through that before. 

Instead, she slinks out of the Mortuary like a common thief. The Coven has suspicion waiting for her and the thousand questions of where’s Zelda and why aren’t you with Zelda and Lilith has been through that before too, even if Ambrose and Sabrina stand next to her, supporting her unwaveringly. 

“Come back to us, please,” Sabrina had said, whispered in Lilith’s ear as she tightly wraps her arms around her neck. “It’s empty here without you.”

Lilith had murmured a promise into her skin and vanished anyways. She had no place in hell, no place on earth, so she wandered from hotel to hotel, chasing a ghost. She realises now that there’s no remedy for memory, and that Zelda’s memory will haunt her to the grave. It branded her with a force stronger than a hot iron upon skin with a stench worse than burnt flesh. 

At night she dreams of a woman with red lips and fire for hair and eyes as green as the forest that surrounded her sanctuary. She dreams of a witch with bright eyes who would send objects fly across the classroom. She dreams of milky white blood and tear stained cheeks and wakes up drenched in sweat. At night she whispers names that were forgotten. They drop like stones in her heart. 

Ghosts are real, and Zelda’s follows her as she races away across the world. 

 

-

 

She’s in Venice when she sees Zelda. She’s standing outside of Saint Marks Basilica, breathing in the rich sea air that is tainted with rot and spices. The inside is just as grand as the exterior, paintings upon paintings and for the first time Lilith is blissfully aware that it is empty. She kneels before the Chancel. 

There’s something foolish about this, praying to a god that always abandoned her. A lord who has constantly forsaken her and done nothing as Lilith lost everything and everyone she’d ever cared about. She clears her throat, clasps her hands, and waits, wondering if she’s even going through the motions right.

“I haven’t had a home for a long time,” Lilith starts, “and the world’s a lonely place.” She wrings her hands anxiously, curling them around herself, around the weight of the dress she wore. “But some things have made it less lonely. I survived for a year after the Eldritch Terrors. I even believed in something. I didn’t need to stay. I don’t need to stay.”

There’s footsteps behind her and Lilith freezes, the sharp rapping of heels on tile and she’s transported back to Baxter High and wearing someone else’s skin and a witch with a cigarette holder and a low, sinful voice. 

“If you don’t stay here,” the stranger says. “Where will you go?” And Lilith’s heart freezes.

She’s imagined Zelda thousands of times since her death, in thousands of places. She never imagined her alive after the void, never dared hope after milky white turned red and Lilith fled from the room, rather than Ambrose and Sabrina and all of Sabrina’s friends see her rage. Instead she took her pain and wove it into armour and tracked down Faustus, traveled from city to city to town to village in hopes of running away from her past. 

She’s imagined Zelda writhing beneath her in the throes of pleasure. She’s imagined the way Zelda would sound with her name on her lips. She’s imagined Zelda’s taste coating her tongue as Lilith devoured her like the finest of meals, how she would drink her down like wine.

She never imagined Zelda’s ghost cornering her in an empty basilica on a sinking island. 

“You’re dead,” she stutters out, finally turning to meet Zelda’s eyes. “You’re dead, I watched you die all those years ago.”

Zelda stalks towards her. “You never stayed long enough to check for a pulse and Sabrina never told you that I was healing upstairs.” Her words are laced with anger as one would lace a drink with arsenic. “I’ve been chasing you across the world as you run from me, from them, from us.” She’s so close to Lilith now, so close and Lilith reaches out to touch her, imagining her fingers meeting a vaporous form so she’d be left with nothing but Zelda’s smell and Zelda’s haunting voice in her ears as she breaks again. 

Instead, her hand meets something solid, corporeal, there’s warm flesh beneath her fingers and Zelda gaze softens inexplicability as Lilith caresses her cheek, swallowing back emotions that she had long buried. She drags Zelda down to her unceremoniously, resting her forehead against hers, tangling their fingers together. There’s tears running freely down her cheeks now and she doesn’t know how to stop them. 

All she knows is that Zelda is here, in front of her, alive and alive and alive.

“Welcome home.”

Lilith tugs Zelda closer with her palm curled around the back of her neck, and her lips burn like a brand on Zelda’s forehead. She had forgotten heat like this could exist, blistering through her skin, spreading through her body until every nerve fibre snaps and fires at once. Zelda smells like nicotine, and cloves, and the bite of rotten kelp that layers over Venice when the winds shift. It’s not close enough, nor firm enough, even though her nails must be leaving tiny crescent moons on Zelda’s skin. 

Zelda pulls away from her touch, and comes back to capture Lilith’s lips. Her mouth opening above hers, sweet and warm and so very alive. Lilith never wants to leave Zelda’s arms, never wants to let go of her, of this, this moment in time where she holds her close. 

The kiss is secondary. When they part, still so close Lilith’s breaths mingle with Zelda’s their foreheads resting against each other. 

“Say that to me again,” Lilith orders, the soft puff of air a teasing ghost. “Say that to me each time I come back from the academy, come back from Baxter High, come back from wherever I lose myself.” The promise in the simplicity of it all is unbearable, leaves Zelda aching, clawing Lilith a little bit closer, a little bit tighter.

“I will,” Zelda says, and it’s a vow of its own. 

 

-

 

She does. 

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